


pursuit of something damned

by FSTP



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical "Death", Canon-Typical Violence, Experimentation, Explicit Language, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:28:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27625409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FSTP/pseuds/FSTP
Summary: With every purge, the blight infection spreads and gets worse. More killers end up infected, twisted into worse monsters than they ever were, and the Entity hasn’t offered any help in the way of preventing it.This time around, some of them decide to try and find the source of things - and end up getting more than they bargained for.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

They’d never warned him away from the fringes of the fog _directly_ , but it wasn’t hard to pick things up. 

Listening in, spying, torturing for information, and, if he couldn’t manage any of the other three first, actual conversations - they all told Danny little bits and pieces about the bizarre world he resided in, and since he was an expert at piecing things together, he felt like he had a pretty good grasp on the place. 

It was like a puzzle. There were a lot of random center pieces, curved and random and barely grouped together except by color or, in this case, relevance to a certain place, but every so often he found an edge piece. Something solid he could connect to another offhand comment, another deliberate insult or warning. And then things would start to take shape, and in his head he’d figured out quite a bit that the others probably didn’t realize he knew. 

The fog wasn’t exactly _infinite_ , for instance. It had room for infinite expansion, but there was always something like a border. Only a few ways in, and no way out - not for the survivors and not even for them, the killers. As much prisoners as the prey they hunted. It annoyed him, but it was an easy annoyance to ignore; a lot of things were easy to ignore when he had virtually endless opportunities to kill at hand. 

The border, or the barrier, the edge, the fringes - it was where places went when they were no longer useful. He knew about the Void - had been warned away from _that_ emphatically, and very quickly learned that for once heeding a warning was probably a good idea - and that was the eventual end point, but over time places were just pushed out and out, ignored and forgotten, until eventually they crumbled and became part of that endless orange storm that lay a breath away from the fog itself. 

As they disintegrated, they got more and more dangerous. Being stuck in a place when it finally became part of the Void was an instant death sentence. Because of that, the killers stayed away from them. Stuck to the fog they knew and the realms that were familiar. It wouldn’t have been anything worth thinking about if he hadn’t found out that some people found those places _safe_. 

They were safe from killers, even safe from the Entity, who focused on its own hunger too much to care about one or two victims slipping out of its grasp. And that alone had Danny’s attention, because he’d spent almost half his life finding people’s safe places and tearing them apart. 

The danger of disintegration and the subtle warnings he’d heard about the handful of survivors who’d managed to slip out from under the Entity’s perpetual gaze barely fazed him. He was fast, he was dangerous, and he was smart. He’d gotten out of nasty scrapes before, and he’d do it again. 

And maybe, just maybe, if he caught a survivor straying away and dragged them back to the ever-watchful gaze of the thing above them kicking and screaming and fighting, the Entity would cut him a little fucking slack for once. 

Between that, the intrigue, and a perpetual, growing boredom, Danny took to the fog without a word to anybody else and went wandering. Paths through the fog were easy to find for anyone in tune with the monster above them, so he went looking for one that wasn’t familiar. That had to be what led him to his eventual end goal. Somewhere lost and broken and, hopefully, riddled with terror and desperate hope he could smash. 

Not the rage and the smell of burning metal. Not sparks and promises of pain and the bright scent of electricity in the air. Not old blood, not frozen air, not rotting pigs or gunsmoke or the sharp copper stink of blood on razor wire. Something else. Something old that, for him, was totally new. 

Even if smells didn’t lead him, then maybe emotions would. _Hope_ was a rare light in the fog. There was obviously going to be a swathe around the campfire, where he could never go, so maybe if there was a fragment of it somewhere else he’d find what he wanted. It wasn’t like any of his fellow killers were going to have any of it; he couldn’t get lost trying to follow it. 

Wrong turns, blocked paths, turning back on his own footsteps that vanished before he could see what direction he’d come from … by the time he found a lead the frustration was growing, getting more and more potent. Like stalking someone who knew he was coming or chasing a survivor who’d evaded him, smashed him over the head with a solid wall of wood and run for it. 

But there _was_ a lead. Something to get him where he wanted to go. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was sensing, but it wasn’t fear, wasn’t anger, wasn’t guilt or grief - it _might_ have been bloodlust, but it was watered down, filtered, and layered over with something he couldn’t quite name. 

And it was new. That meant he was on the right path. 

The fog cleared, eventually. It left him in a place that made even him uneasy to stand in: huge shadows of buildings, half-burned and mostly collapsed, loomed nearby and faded into the distance, the sky above them a dark, dark orange, like a cloudy night sky lit by distant fires. There was a mist coming up from the ground - not the fog, but something that swirled and clung to his ankles as he moved. 

Scattered around were ornate metal fences, mostly collapsed. Dead ahead was a mausoleum. Somehow, he could just _tell._ The ornate stonework, the lit torches, the windows made out of delicate filigreed metal and black glass … the only thing missing were the angels on either side of the doors, a feature probably not present because the Entity wouldn’t be able to comprehend the idea of it. 

Where the hell had it gotten the idea of a _crypt_ from? Danny made his way to the building, which was too big even for something stolen from the real world, and paused just outside the doors. One was slightly open. He peered inside and saw the occasional moving shadow, like something cast by firelight. There were no sounds, there was … no smell, really, and nothing he could pick up on through his Entity-granted sixth sense. 

But something had led him here. Something new and different and attractive. He pulled out his knife and pushed the door open with his other hand. 

The hinges creaked like something out of a bad horror movie. If anyone was inside, they’d notice - but there was no reaction, no response. Not even a sudden scurrying of feet as someone fled. 

The unease drained out of him as he stepped inside and looked around. There were torches in here, too, high enough to be out of reach. The walls were carved into empty alcoves, the pillars between them not quite reaching the domed ceiling; each one was topped by something, either a stone crow or a pile of rubble. 

Danny eyed one of the crows carefully. The crows he saw in trials, and in other pockets of the fog from time to time, were the Entity’s eyes and ears; who knew if this was just some new disguise waiting to attack him for straying from approved paths? But he dismissed the thought out of hand. Their unfathomable benefactor didn’t have that kind of creativity or subtlety - at least, not in its own realm. It didn’t have to. 

Other than that, there was nothing of interest for him to find. He slid his knife back into its sheathe and wandered from one side of the place to the other, picking at cracks in the stone, checking the filigree on the windows for blood, but the whole thing was just cool, dry, and dull. Maybe what he’d felt wasn’t here. Maybe he was just lost as hell. 

He turned to leave when something caught his eye. His vision had finally adjusted to the dim light inside the crypt enough that he noticed something he’d missed before: a little trail of black splotches on the floor opposite the doorway in. He crouched down by them and scuffed a splotch with a finger. 

It had been something once; now it was just crumbling black dust. It looked distinctly dripped, though, and he risked a glance up to see nothing but shadows on the high domed roof above him. Something must have been up there, or wandered through here, and trailed _this_ , and … left. But there wasn’t much of it. 

It wasn’t blood. Blood didn’t dry like that. And it didn’t crumble. This was something that had burned. Not the stone, either; there was a discolored spot left behind where he’d scratched the stuff up, but the stone floor itself was still level. So, he wondered, what in the hell had been out here, dripping _something_ onto the floor and vanishing into nothing? 

His attention was so fixed on the question that he didn’t sense the presence coming up behind him; the light of the torches made the dancing shadows blend into each other and hide the approach. He _did_ pick up on a very faint breathing, but by the time that happened the walking stick had already hit him in the back of the skull, in just the right place and with just the right amount of force to knock him out cold in an instant.  
  


* * *

Waking came in two parts. 

The first was the slow, inevitable rise, like trying to swim through a sea of old blood. Thought crawled back, and so did sound, followed by light; it was like a dream, even though he hadn’t dreamed in years. A distant part of him thought the whole thing was like coming out of sedation. He’d had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled once. Letting someone knock him out had been rough, but there’d been enough potential problems with leaving the tooth in that he risked it. 

With that realization came the second part. 

The _actual_ realization that someone had fucking _drugged him._

Danny came back into full waking reeling forward, already reaching for his knife, and found he couldn’t do either. He was strapped down to something. Instinct and wild hatred made him thrash to try and free himself, but that only lasted a few seconds; it didn’t take him long to realize that wasn’t the right path to take. It wasn’t working. 

Instead, as his mind cleared and took on a layer of crystal clarity, he took stock of the situation. 

He wasn’t in the crypt anymore. He couldn’t really see where he was; the whole place was dark, lit by maybe two or three candles and something glowing bright orange on a table not far from him. What he was strapped to was some kind of chair - almost like something Amanda would use in one of her nasty little games. He tested the leather straps around his wrists; they wouldn’t give. They were about as effective as anything she could ever use. 

They were around other parts of him, too, making anything more complex than little movements impossible. His head was free, at least, and his mask was still on. That cooled things a little. Whoever this was understood where the line was drawn. 

Or wanted to cross it while he was awake. 

On top of that, there was a sharp, insistent pain in his back, and something like cold air on his skin. A little shifting and he managed to figure out that someone had cut a hole in his jacket and the shirt underneath and jammed … _something_ into the space between his shoulderblade and spine. He could feel the blood trailing down his skin, still slightly warm. A few tests didn’t dislodge whatever it was, so it was stuck in there good. 

There was nothing he could do. No way to get free, at least not yet. Danny took a moment to manage the rage and frustration and turn it into something he could actually use. 

He listened for a little while, trying to figure out where he might be and _who might be responsible_ , but he didn’t hear anything in particular. Just a constant silence that reminded him of the fog. So … he could be anywhere. Carter might have found a new basement in his little asylum, but … no, there wasn’t enough metal around for it to be him; the place looked practically homey in comparison to the nightmare of razor-edged machinery Carter worked with. Not Evan, either; if he was going to torture someone, it started with a bear trap. Not Legion, probably; not even Julie would try to pull something like this off. 

Maybe Amanda had finally gotten sick of him. This seemed like her style. He wasn’t wearing one of her defining masks, but hell, there was always still time. 

“Very funny, Amanda,” he said out loud, hoping to hear the rattle of metal as his voice startled her, or the _shink_ of her wristblade as she automatically extended it. “I’m impressed you got me here. Mind letting me out? I won’t stab you if you do.” 

Silence. So much silence it sucked his words out of the air and made them seem small and distant. Danny listened, head tilted, and waited. Oh, well. Might as well keep going. 

“Did you buy the drugs off Carter, or the clown? I’m surprised you even bothered. Could have just smashed the back of my skull in and let me fix myself up. Does that mean you’re starting to like me?” 

Still no response. He tested the bindings again, flexing his chest to try and strain the leather band, but where he had more strength than the average adult man, he wasn’t exactly a bodybuilder. 

“Come on, hurry up. Let’s see what you’ve got in mind.” 

There was a distant shuffling. Not too distant, but not close at hand; he glared into the darkness but couldn’t see any movement. The weight of his knife sheathe was still reassuringly around his leg, and it was heavy enough that he knew the knife was still in it. She must have been pretty confident in herself to leave him armed. 

Danny fell silent and listened again, hearing the shuffling get closer. Uneven footsteps, and the gentle _click_ of something more solid. Just above it he started to hear a voice that was distinctly not a woman’s voice, Amanda’s or otherwise. 

It didn’t get much louder as it approached; whoever was talking was muttering, mostly to themselves. And it wasn’t a familiar voice. It was too old, for one. Too worn-down. No growling undercurrent to suggest the Entity’s intervention. And there was an accent he couldn’t quite place, also unfamiliar. 

“ … has a physiological similarity to the survivors,” said the disembodied voice in the darkness. “Very little intervention seems to have been needed. Other than standard scarring, nothing seems out of place.” 

A shape resolved itself out of the shadows. A figure, not too tall, not very wide, wearing a heavy hooded robe that hid any particularly identifying features. In one hand he was using a walking stick; in the other he was carrying a journal. Old-fashioned, too, and well worn, or at least as far as he could tell. 

But the little details took second place to the knowledge that this _wasn’t_ a little game Amanda was playing, or something Legion wanted to try out, or Carter crossing a line or someone else trying to take pointless revenge. He had no idea who this was. And no idea where _he_ was. And he was restrained well enough that he couldn’t break out, and - 

Even the straps on his arms, the ones that twisted and acted more on the Entity’s will than his own, had been wrapped and knotted around the arms of the chair. He could feel them fighting to untie themselves, but the knots were too tight. 

It wasn’t exactly having the tables turned, but it made uncertainty prickle up his spine. 

The figure set both the notebook and the walking stick on the table and fished a pen - a quill pen, he noticed, an _actual_ quill pen, the feather on it black and missing pieces - and a bottle of ink out of a pocket in the robe. He set them up and started writing in the journal, mumbling to himself the whole time. 

“If similarities maintain, chance of death is at least … seventy percent,” he said, as Danny watched him scrawl what had to be his own spoken notes on the fading, yellowy pages. “However, physical similarities do not always hold precedence; sufficient psychological connectivity would lower that to thirty percent.” 

“Very interesting,” Danny shot in, and sneered when the man didn’t so much as flinch. “But around here, my chances of dying are, oh … nonexistent?” 

“A temporary death is still a death,” said the man, in the same dull voice, and then continued monologuing to himself. “Likelihood of full connectivity is low; however, certain signs indicate a higher level than previous subjects. Observations also suggest much higher levels of self-sustained killing instinct.” 

“That’s an interesting way to put it.” Danny drummed his fingers on the chair arms. “Most people just say ‘psychopath’ and leave it at that.” 

“Interesting term, but I find it simplifies things far too much.” The man shut the notebook, but didn’t look up yet. “It categorizes and tucks away. Suggests there’s one simple solution to the problem. I’ve found that’s very rarely the case.” 

“Should I take that as a compliment?” One of the straps was almost loose, but a sudden jerk told him there was more holding it in place than itself. Maybe a pin. Maybe a nail. It made fresh frustration seethe through him. “If I did, it might make up for the fact that you compared me to the meat earlier.” 

The man turned his head to look at Danny. The hood was large enough that his face was mostly hidden in shadow; there was no way to identify him, or even pick up on his expression. 

“You do enjoy hearing yourself speak, don’t you?” 

“I didn’t always have the chance to,” he said lightly, and gave one definite jerk on the restraints around his right arm. They didn’t give. “It’s one of the reasons why I like it here. In general. _Here_ , specifically? Not so much. Mind undoing a few of these? I can take care of the rest.” 

“In time,” said the man, which was a surprise. “Depending on the path you take, you may not even need my help.” 

“The path _I_ take?” Danny echoed. “You mean whether I open you up like a salmon filet or not?” 

There was no response. The man made his way around to the side of the table and leaned forward, like he was writing something. Danny tried to crane his neck to see what he was doing, but there wasn’t enough give for him to pull it off. 

“So are you one of those survivors who managed to find a loophole and escape the trials?” he asked, knowing he probably wasn’t going to get a clear answer but wanting to see if he could piss the bastard off anyway. If he got close enough, there was always space to grab something - and maybe, if he was lucky, get his hands on something he could use as a weapon. Anyone wandering in the fog wasn’t going to do so unarmed. 

“You could say that.” There was barely any movement. 

“How’d you pull it off, then?” 

“I said you could say it.” The man lifted something up from the table and shook it lightly in the air. “I didn’t say you’d be right.” 

“Then who the hell are you?” 

There was no response. Again. Danny felt the rage in him flicker, the heat catching, embers giving way to flames. Being attacked and drugged and tied down and insulted was bad enough, but being ignored on top of it all? 

“I’ll assume stray survivor, then,” he said dryly. “You got lucky, creeping away. And you’ve got one hell of a set of balls on you to attack one of the fog’s best killers.” 

The man snorted, almost a laugh. 

“The _best?_ ” he echoed, and the derision in his voice made Danny grind his teeth together. 

“Considering the alternatives? At least _I_ can do the job right.” 

“But you don’t always.” Whatever the man was holding, he set down again. “They get away from you sometimes, hm? And then you get … exactly what you’re owed.” 

“Ooh, he knows all our little secrets,” Danny said, managing to keep his voice light and mocking through sheer willpower alone. “I pull it off way more than anybody else. And I do it because I _want_ to. Not because I’m at gunpoint, or because I’m hallucinating.” 

“And you think that makes you better?” 

“Depends on your perspective.” 

“Everything depends on perspective.” The quill pen clicked quietly on the table as the man set it down. “If it’s the perspective through your own underwear, for instance, then even the most unreasonable and ridiculous ideas seem perfectly sane.” 

Danny forced out a laugh. One of the other straps was almost free, but it was nailed in place, too. Something trickled down the side of his jaw. It took him a second to realize he was sweating. 

“Then yours must be nailed to your fucking face. This is going to be the death of you, you know. Either when I get my hands on you, or when the Entity finally finds you.” 

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard that before.” And there really _was_ no fear in the bastard’s voice. Not even anger, or frustration. It was like this was a routine. Like he’d done this a hundred times before and wasn’t expecting to see anything new today. “I haven’t been found yet. I doubt _you_ are such an important figure that anything is going to change.” 

“You’re in for a surprise.” 

No response. Again. _Again._ It was like dealing with Evan. Or that samurai fuck. Or Caleb, even, when he caught him on a bad day. The silence wasn’t just silence, it was deliberate - looking at him, evaluating him, judging him as _not a threat_ , and then dismissing him out of hand. And where he didn’t have much of a choice but to take it in stride with the others, he _didn’t_ have to take it from stray meat. 

“How long do you think you can keep me here?” he asked, the edge in his voice like a razor. The irritation was starting to wear his usual veneer thin. “I’ll get called eventually. Not even you can keep me from a trial.” 

“I wasn’t planning to keep you long at all.” There was a faint, strange noise. “You woke up sooner than I expected. If we hadn’t been having a conversation, you’d already be on your way by now.” 

“Why don’t I believe that?” 

“Believe what suits you.” 

The total lack of any kind of fear was putting Danny off. Even when he was at his least threatening, his presence alone tended to keep people on their toes. This bastard clearly _didn’t care_. He’d had the foresight to restrain every part of him that might be dangerous, and he wasn’t even armed - well, not with a traditional weapon, anyway. How long had he been running wild in the fog? How much did he know? 

“Mind telling me what’s in my back, at least?” Danny asked, keeping his voice casual through sheer force of will. “If you stabbed me, you used a shitty blade. I’m not going to bleed out like this.” 

“If my plan was to kill you, you wouldn’t have woken up here.” 

The man lifted something up just high enough that Danny caught a glimpse of it over his shoulder. It was something all at once totally alien and terribly familiar to see. 

He’d seen the blight purge, the way the flowers erupted from the ground in not just pockets of the fog but in trials, too; he’d heard that they were dangerous, and not worth messing with, which he’d had no problem acknowledging because botany was field where he cherished his ignorance. And he’d seen the effects of the blight _serum_ , or at least the aftermath, and that was one area where people didn’t seem shy about telling him what had happened. 

He’d seen the orange gleam, the broken glass, the incredible destruction. And he was seeing the orange gleam and slightly-cracked glass in front of him now, an unreasonably large syringe in his should-have-been-temporary captor’s hand filled with something sick to look at, a paper tag dangling off the back end. 

“That’s _blight serum_ ,” he snarled, feeling sweat trickle down his neck, a cold pit opening in his stomach. “Are you the asshole who’s been running around shooting everyone up with that shit?” 

“So the rumor goes.” There was still no change in the bastard’s tone. 

“And you think it’s my turn now? Good fucking luck.” Danny laughed, hollow and empty and forced, and hauled on the restraints with everything he had. He could hear them straining, hear the metal of the busted chair start to creak, but they didn’t give. He slammed himself down on the half-back of the chair to try and break it, but it only rattled and clattered. 

The straps on his coat pulled hard against their own restraints. He clawed at the arms, trying to wrench his hands free even if it dislocated something. He tried to kick, tried to force the straps around his ankles to give way. 

Nothing happened. 

“Consider yourself fortunate,” said the man as Danny tried to tear his way free, gently tapping the syringe with a finger. “You’re contributing to the scientific progress of this realm. Perhaps you will be the source that frees us.” 

Danny didn’t respond; he was barely listening at this point. 

“Personally, I doubt it.” The man turned around now, the syringe in his hands. Danny’s eyes locked on it and watched it as he approached, making his way around to the back of the chair - well out of reach of even the most desperate grab. “I can’t see anything worthwhile in you. Might be good for a laugh, though.” 

“You’re going to regret this,” Danny snarled, feeling the presence behind him rather than seeing it, making a sound that was barely human when a hand grabbed his head and forced it painfully far forward. 

“I doubt that.” 

The syringe hit home against whatever was already digging into his back. A twist locked it in place. He hissed at the brief pain of the needle lodging into his skin, but it was a short one; it went just deep enough to sting. 

For a few seconds, nothing happened. The hand on his head let go, and he _thrashed_ , some part of him under all the rage dreading the inevitable. He watched the shadowy figure make his way back to the table, pick up his notebook and pen and turn around to … do nothing. 

No. Not nothing. To _watch._ Like he was observing a new, mildly unusual specimen. 

And then there was a hiss. 

He _felt_ the blight pour into him, curl under his skin, spread like a gas fire along every nerve and tendon, pulse through his veins and back around into his arteries. It didn’t hurt so much as it just _felt_ ; he’d never been aware of his bones before, but now they had their own strange presence. And there was a heat, too. Not unpleasant, except for the part where he could feel it pooling under every pore. 

“Ten seconds … no reaction.” 

The words floated overhead. Danny ignored them and pulled harder at the restraints. The heat was building. Coming up from inside. Stealing his fury and frustration and using them to fuel itself, making him cough and choke. 

And laugh. 

It broke out of him in wild hysteria as the heat turned into pain, as the serum coursed through him and found what it was looking for and caught fire, burned up everything inside until it reached skin and _blazed_. The laughter turned into yelling. Into screaming. Something he’d sworn he’d never do. 

“Thirty seconds … clear pain, but nothing to show for it yet - ” 

The fire erupted. 

So did he.  


* * *

  
What he remembered most clearly, afterwards, was the pain. 

He’d never really been hurt before coming to the fog. Cuts, scrapes, a broken arm, a tooth extraction, a mild concussion … little things, in retrospect. He’d never expected to get badly hurt, even in his line of work. 

The Entity wasn’t a particularly _kind_ master, especially when faced with a fuckup. Danny was good enough at what he was supposed to do to avoid the really nasty consequences, but he’d had his fair share of wildly unpleasant performance reviews. And, of course, he’d been gutted by almost every killer in the fog. They tended to leave a mark. 

All of that paled in comparison to the sheer, unrelenting agony of the blight. It consumed everything. Every sense. Every inch. It burned him up from the inside out, hollowing out his entire body, leaving him in nothing but a never-ending nebula of pain. He’d screamed his throat raw, or maybe that had just been the blight itself, finding another way out. 

It got so bad that after a while he detached himself from it - still _feeling_ it, but distantly, like it wasn’t really _his_ pain. Maybe all his nerves had burned out; maybe his brain just couldn’t process it. The reasoning didn’t matter. It left him a reeling, half-blind wreck, with only two things left in his head: the urge to kill, and the urge to make everyone _suffer_. 

He remembered a trial. Maybe a few trials. Either he escaped the bastard somehow or the Entity finally came for him, and he landed somewhere dark, somewhere that the splattered orange light all over him must have showed up like a beacon. Somehow, that didn’t matter. He could still chase. He could still kill. 

And he remembered the meat being terrified. One of them had turned, seen him, _screamed_ in real terror. High and sharp and broken. He’d chased her down, slammed a gleaming knife into her, dragged her to a hook and done what he was supposed to do. 

Pieces of trials flickered through his memory like burning leaves sent fluttering by the heat. Fear. Blood. Death. His vision was distorted, twisted - but he could still see the best bits. 

Then … what? He’d been set loose again. No more trials. No more duty. But still the burning urge to _kill_. To spread what had once been his pain to everybody else. 

Which … he sure as hell wasn’t doing now. 

The pain was back, but it wasn’t as bad as before. Lights flickered overhead. They looked like they were coming from a long way away. 

Time passed without passing. Occasionally he saw a shadow, or a silhouette. It looked familiar. His brain was too burned to place it, but it didn’t _seem_ threatening. And as the pain ebbed, he figured out that he wasn’t in immediate danger. Not anymore. 

Eventually his vision cleared enough that he recognized both the dull gray walls and bright fluorescent lights nearby and the silhouette intermittently at his side as the meat plant and Amanda, respectively. Being helpless _here_ wasn’t usually a good idea, and the pressure around his wrists didn’t help that thought much, but there were too many other missing factors to say she was trying to play her little game with him. 

It took him a while before he tried speaking. Every breath hurt, so logically, words would hurt more, and he’d had his fill of pain for the rest of eternity. 

“What - happened.” 

Amanda turned from where she was busy working on something. Another trap, probably. She wasn’t wearing her mask; she usually didn’t outside a trial, because it limited her sight and got in the way of her work. So he could see her face, and see that she didn’t look surprised to see him awake and talking. 

She made her way over to where he was lying and pulled up a chair to sit on. 

“Guess,” she said dryly. He tried to sneer, but even that hurt his face. 

“Blight,” he managed. “But - how’d I - get here?” 

She watched him for a while, as if trying to line up her words, or maybe decide if he was worth telling. He waited. Normally he’d have been impatient. Right now, he had nothing else to occupy him except the pain. 

“They found you at the farm,” she said, eventually. “Going crazy. Shedding blight everywhere. As far as I heard, you - ” 

\- staggered out of the fog in a crazed mess, all blight and burned skin, a knife practically soldered to his hand and looking to kill. He’d found Leatherface first, out in the field, trying to keep things organized, and gone after him in a rage. 

And because not everyone was driven to kill by some kind of deep and dramatic fury, he’d _run_ , booking it back to the farmhouse with the scorched and twisted Ghost Face behind him. The chaos had drawn Max, whose hatred had long since overcome his fear, and seeing a blighted figure hauling ass through _his_ cornfields had been enough to set the bastard off. 

They’d fought. Max had the strength, but Danny had been so far gone the pain didn’t even register anymore. A sledgehammer to the ribs had barely fazed him. The fight went wild, spread serum, tainted the ground they were standing on and killed anything that hadn’t already been dying. 

Things might have gotten bad for all of them if Evan hadn’t showed up, either drawn by the insanity or just out looking for something to do. He hadn’t hesitated; the existence of the blight pissed him off more than it did almost anybody else, and he’d go out of his way to cut it down where he found it. Having an opportunity to gut Danny was probably a bonus. 

So he’d intervened, and between the two of them they managed to drop him and get the syringe out of his back. Afterward, Evan dragged Danny to the meat plant, dumping him on Amanda. 

“Why you?” 

“If you got worse, I’d just kill you again,” she said. “I’ve got ways of keeping you down until you’re better.” 

Danny tested the cuffs around his wrists, an unbidden memory of the candlelit darkness flashing across his vision as he did so. These were metal. Even harder to get off than leather. But he knew Amanda. Didn’t necessarily trust her, but … knew her, anyway. 

If he had a relapse, she _would_ kill him, without hesitation. Stop him before he had the chance to run amok again. It was more than a little frustrating that he found the concept comforting. 

“Where’s - my mask.” 

He knew he wasn’t wearing it. There was too much of the world visible. He couldn’t feel the pressure. He wasn’t wearing the rest of his outfit, either, but what was important was the mask. 

Amanda’s expression didn’t change. She paused a few seconds before she spoke. 

“Later.” 

“No. Where is - it.” 

She looked at him, then reached down out of sight. When her hand came back up, it was holding something red - long, a little shiny and a little not, slightly curved, with some give where her fingers were. 

There must have been something in his expression she could still read, because she grabbed the other end of it and pulled. It stretched. 

“It melted to your face,” she said, in the same sort of tone as before. “Or maybe your face melted to it. I’m still pulling it off you.” 

Danny stared at her. Every word made sense, but the sentences didn’t, and none of it lined up to the red, rubbery _thing_ she was holding. It must have showed, because she tossed it back out of sight and reached out toward his face. 

He felt her fingers catch something next to his ear and pull. He hissed at the sharp sting of pain, but it didn’t stop. It felt like she was pulling his skin off. Stopping her wasn’t an option; he flexed against the cuffs, but they didn’t give. 

A second later she pulled whatever she had off with a short _rip_ and held it up. It looked exactly like whatever she’d been holding a minute ago. And it had come off of _him_. 

“Like I said.” She tossed it out of sight. “Melted to your face.” 

And for once in his life, Danny was lost for words.  


* * *

  
Recovery was slow. Whether it was because the Entity didn’t appreciate his wandering out of reach in the fog or because it just couldn’t help with a problem made out of its own sick purge, he didn’t know. And neither did anybody else. 

Between him and Amanda they managed to get the rest of the melted skin-mask off of him. It meant that she was seeing his face, his _actual_ face, for the first time; it was the first time anybody in the fog had ever seen it at all. That on top of everything else was infuriating. The only reason he didn’t stab her out of frustration was because he didn’t have a knife. 

“Keep it to yourself,” he’d snarled, and she actually laughed. 

“Why? Nobody cares what you look like.” 

“Consider it one of those personal things you always said you didn’t give a shit about.” 

“Sure.” She was lying, he could _tell_ , but he wasn’t in the mood to argue. “Once I see it in full, anyway.” 

“In full?” 

“You’re a mess right now.” She prodded at the air in front of his face. “You’ve barely got anything for me to look at. Once you heal … then I’ll get a good look.” 

Danny, personally, wasn’t interested in seeing what he looked like right now. Seeing his arms turned black and red by burns, seeing _half his fucking torso_ slowly starting to piece itself back together and still glowing from the blight, didn’t fill him with much interest in what a face that had melted to plastic must have looked like. Amanda hadn’t so much as flinched, but then again, she was used to seeing people missing critical pieces, like their entire head. 

But eventually, as the pain faded into flickers and sparks, the rage-driven curiosity of what had been done to him got to be too much. 

Amanda helped him to the nearby bathroom, to his disgust. His legs hadn’t even been that brutalized by the blight, but he’d tried to stand and hit the floor instantly, so it was only with her support that he even got to the doorway, and from there to the sink, fingers gripping the dirty basin like grim death. 

He stared at himself in the mirror for the first time since he’d set foot in the fog. 

Most of his hair was still intact; the rest was growing back. His skin was patchy, pink and shiny in places, healing from the burns and regrowing where it had been torn away. There was a missing patch under his mouth, black and red, healing that much more slowly. Raw blight, Amanda had said. Pouring out of his mask. 

His shoulders were looking strange, patchy and uneven, some spots healed and some not. He hadn’t had the first idea what had happened there until Amanda told him that skin had sloughed off him in what looked like wings. Taking the place of his coat, bright and bloody and pulsing; she’d cut them off, she said, while he was still barely conscious. 

And there was his stomach, of course, but the less he looked at that the better. He tried to focus on his face. 

One eye was its normal gray. The other, the one that should have been hazel, was a bright, gleaming orange. Inhuman. Unnatural. Supernatural, even. The color was spilling out of the iris into the white of his eye. Strangely, it didn’t hurt. Just looked _wrong_. 

“It’s better than it was,” Amanda said from the doorway, and he glared at her reflection. 

“Don’t.” 

He turned on the sink. Rusty water poured out; he let it go for a while, to see if it would get any better. 

“I’m surprised Frank hasn’t been down here to start something,” he said, trying to force his voice into a casual tone. “News like this gets around.” 

“He got caught too.” 

“What?” 

“He got caught,” she repeated. “By the same person as you.” 

Thoughts flickered through Danny’s brain. Some almost made it to his mouth, but he carefully shut them away. 

“Nice to know I wasn’t an isolated incident.” He cupped a hand in the still-reddish water and splashed it on the least-burned areas of his face. “So the rest of them are taking care of him, then? Otherwise I would have expected _someone_ to show up and take a few potshots.” 

“No. They got caught with him.” 

“All four of them? At once?” 

“Yeah.” Amanda’s expression in the mirror hadn’t even flickered. “All together.” 

“So what happened?” 

He watched as she brought her hands up in the reflection, slotted her fingers between each other and pressed her palms together. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

She stared right back at him, hands in front of her face. 

“They got caught together. And … they got _stuck_ together.” 

The idea took a few seconds to take root in his head, and even when it did, he still didn’t really get what she was saying. Stuck together? Like that fucking bastard of a scientist had stitched them together and injected them with his serum? Or … something else? 

His imagination, normally able to run wild with something like that, failed him. He decided not to question it. 

“I see.” Danny flicked the water off and tried to stand by himself, but even that much exertion made his knees start to give way. “Guess I’ll ask them about it later.” 

Amanda shrugged, and helped him back to the chair. 

The Entity didn’t call him while he was recovering. In some ways, it was a positive; he wasn’t sure how effective he could be in his current state, and failing to live up to his reputation after his blighted trials would make him look like an idiot. In other ways, it left him restrained and pissed off. Getting back to a trial would mean getting back to _killing_ , and nothing made him feel better than watching someone die at his hands. 

But fucking it up would have put him in an even worse mood, so he just accepted the opportunity to heal. 

Time … passed, in its strange unmoving way. Eventually, Evan came to see him. 

At least he had his mask back by then. He’d asked Amanda to get one of his knives out of the footlocker she’d given him, so that he had _something_ to feel like an actual threat again, and when she’d opened it there was the mask, slip and all, sitting on top of the various offerings he’d collected. A gift from the Entity, or maybe just a lucky break. 

He knew it didn’t have the same effect without the rest of his outfit to make the unnatural white of it stand out, but it was enough. Besides, Evan wasn’t intimidated by him even on a good day. 

“Still alive, huh.” 

“You thought that would be enough to get rid of me?” 

“Hoped so.” The bone mask tilted up slightly. “If anyone deserved that, it was you.” 

Danny snorted. Evan was leaning against a wall by the nearest empty doorway, his stupid mask as half-expressionless as always. He’d brought his cleaver, but let it sit against the wall next to him, a very clear and present insult that he didn’t consider Danny a threat right now. It riled, especially because of how accurate it was. 

“Really? Considering everyone else here? I’m almost hurt.” He picked at one of his fingernails with his knife. “It’s going to take more than a drug overdose to send _me_ spiraling that far out of the Entity’s favor.” 

“Maybe.” Evan watched him for a few seconds. “You remember anything?” 

“Pieces. What Amanda told me. I’m not going to thank you for stopping me.” 

“Wasn’t expecting you to. I mean before. How you got caught.” 

“Oh? Want to know if I’m as dumb as you were?” 

“Want to know if you saw anything,” said Evan, surprisingly even given the insult. 

And where the memories of being blighted were patchy at best, everything _before_ that was still sharp. The dark room, the conversation with the hooded figure, the sight of the syringe before it made its way into his back - but all he did was lean back, ignoring the twinges of pain in his shoulders. 

“I might have,” he said. “But considering you walked in here and started giving me shit, I’m not sure I should tell you anything.” 

The silence built. He almost expected Evan to pick up his cleaver and start cutting the information out of him. 

“You didn’t look the way everyone else did,” he said eventually, to Danny’s surprise. “The rest of us got tumors. Spikes. Twisted up. _You_ looked like Carter fried you inside out.” 

“And?” 

“You think they won’t come back for you?” 

“Come back for me?” he echoed. 

“You didn’t react the same.” Evan’s mask looked unusually bright in the fluorescence of the meat plant. “Could say you were _special_. Something in you took to that serum different. Kept you from being as fucked up as the rest of us. Scientists … ” He shrugged. “They get edgy about differences like that.” 

Danny stared at him. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him, and as it settled into his brain he felt a strange, clenching coldness in his gut. The same way he’d felt on seeing that hooded figure hold up the glowing syringe. 

“Carter’s already saying he wants to take a shot at you. See what makes you tick.” 

“He’s welcome to try,” Danny snapped. “He’ll need a lot of his own reconstructive surgery to fix what I do to him when he does.” 

Evan almost laughed at that. 

“So you think that kind of threat is going to get me to open up?” 

“Wasn’t a threat. Just warning you.” 

And that … didn’t sit well. 

Evan didn’t like Danny, in the same way that most of the Entity’s chosen didn’t like him. He’d broken into his house, poked around in his workshop, _learned_ about him to a degree he didn’t want others reaching. And, of course, there was all the violence - the murder attempts, the revenge-driven murder attempts, general nastiness just because he could - that didn’t incline many positive feelings toward him. 

That he would take the time to deliver a warning that had no benefit to him suggested that there was more at stake here than Danny thought. It was a worrying thought. 

“If I tell you, are you going to use that information to hunt him down and gut him?” 

“If I can.” 

They watched each other for a long few moments. The slow-healing burns on his arms prickled. His chest, still raw, hurt with every breath. 

“I was out on the fringes,” Danny started, keeping his tone as casual as he could, as if this was all _his_ idea. “Just looking around. He surprised me out there, and by the time I woke up, I wasn’t going anywhere. Couldn’t tell you where he brought me, though.” 

Evan said nothing, just listened. Danny relaxed a fraction. 

“I didn’t get a good look at him. He was wearing some kind of hooded robe or something.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But I’d know him if I saw him. Or if I heard him. He looks like one of the survivors.” 

“You sure?” 

“Absolutely. He’s not big enough to be one of us.” Evan tilted his head, but Danny kept going before the fucker could make any pointed comments. “He’s got an attitude. Didn’t mind insulting me, and wasn’t afraid even for a second. We had a nice little conversation before he shot me up.” 

“Say anything worthwhile?” 

“Not really.” He turned his knife over in his hand without thinking about it. “He probably used to be meat. He knew how the trials go. How _we_ don’t always get out without a problem.” 

“Thought so.” 

“Oh really?” 

“I’ve heard rumors about strays running loose. Most of ‘em die out there. Guess some find loopholes.” 

“And this one is using his to attack _us_ ,” Danny snapped. “While the spider doesn’t do a god damned thing to stop it.” 

“You’d do the same in his position.” There was a pause. “Hell, you do it anyway.” 

Danny sneered and scratched at a black mark on his knife. 

“That’s about all. I can show you where I got caught, but not until I’ve gotten a few trials done. Otherwise I can’t guarantee I won’t cut you up instead.” 

There was a snort, and then he watched as Evan picked up the huge bloody cleaver and pushed away from the wall. The tension in him flickered a little. 

“I bet. Come find me when you’re not this pathetic.” 

Danny resisted the urge to make a gesture and focused on his knife instead. Evan started to leave, then stopped and turned. 

He tossed something onto Danny’s lap. 

“Found this on you,” he said, and disappeared through the open doorway. 

His footsteps echoed out of hearing on the concrete floors as Danny picked up the thing. It was a paper tag, heavier than it should have been, old and faded and slightly burned around the edges. Despite its apparent age the ink writing on it was clear: some strange symbol followed by numbers. _2825._

It might have been identifying what kind of serum had been shot into him. Nothing to do with him at all. But those thoughts burned away under the overpowering idea that _he_ , personally, had been classified. Tagged and marked for future reference. Like he was someone’s sick idea of a science experiment. 

And Evan’s nasty little suggestion that he’d been _unique_ , normally a point of flattery for him, was burrowing down into his skull. Making his skin prickle and his heart speed up. The signs of something he was never supposed to feel at just the _thought_ of having to go through that again. 

Danny took a deep breath and felt it come out in a shudder. 

He crushed the tag in his hand and hurled it at the floor, where it bounced once before rolling out of sight.


	2. Chapter 2

The forest around the ski lodge was trapped in permanent winter. The sheer cold of it was the one thing that kept Legion from seeing his wrath every time they decided to run wild on his property; spending too long in a place that cold made the iron in him burn like fire. Even his perpetual internal heat couldn’t fight the chill for long. 

He went there now anyway, and tried to ignore the creeping freeze. 

Evan hadn’t seen what happened to Legion, but he had seen the aftermath. The blood, the serum, the body parts … it hadn’t been pleasant, and it hadn’t made sense. There’d been too many arms for not enough bodies. Not enough blood for the level of violence. And strangest of all, the violence had come at Anna’s hands. 

For some strange reason she had a soft spot for Legion. All of them, even the smart-mouthed leader. She wouldn’t let them steal from her without an axe to the back, but they could run through her territory without worrying about an attack, and she’d let them hide out in her home when they were fighting or injured. Sometimes he’d even seen them just hanging around, wasting time. And she didn’t care. 

He’d assumed it had something to do with her fondness for children, something he couldn’t even begin to understand. Legion were young, even younger than some of the maggots, and she was already soft enough about _them_ that he generally just shrugged and moved on, figuring that was an argument between her and the Entity. Since she was still around, it must have been working out for her. 

So when he’d found her covered in blood and blight, gripping her axe so hard her knuckles were white, the scattered pieces of Legion all around her, he knew something had gone wrong. _Really_ wrong. Enough so that he put his own information about finding the shithead in the leather coat crazed off a blight injection on the backburner. 

Time had passed since then, in the way it didn’t really pass, and ever since she’d been prowling the forest around the lodge when she wasn’t in a trial. He saw others sometimes - mostly the ghost girl, her broken sword in hand - but for the most part, she’d made it her mission to ensure whatever had happened before didn’t happen again. 

She was just stepping out of the lodge when he approached. For a second she looked like she was about to take his head off, and then her vision cleared. 

“Nothing new?” he asked. He didn’t really care about Legion; it was mostly for her concern that he asked at all. 

“No. They’re healing.” She shut the door behind her and headed for the forest. Evan followed her, falling in line with her step. “The fear is still there, though.” 

“It would be.” 

“When I find that thing,” she snarled, baring her teeth, “I will tear off all its limbs. To attack me was foolish. To attack you was an offense. But them …” 

She made a sound he’d only ever heard from animals before. 

“Unforgivable.” 

Evan said nothing. 

The two of them walked in silence for a while, mostly to wait out her rage. Once she’d calmed down, Anna gave him a glance. 

“Did you learn anything?” 

“Some. The idiot was out on the edge of the fog. Doesn’t know where he ended up, but he can show us where he got attacked.” 

“Do you think that will be any help?” 

“More than trying to track someone around here.” 

Legion had been attacked on a few different properties, since they liked running wild. Two in the freezing cold, one in Anna’s forest, and one in the dry, dusty prairie town, the only place any of them ever saw sunlight. They’d been snatched away one at a time. Anna had prowled every spot and found nothing but footprints and a faint smell that vanished as soon as she set foot in the fog. 

It had been the same for all of them. Not everyone had been taken, but in the end, there hadn’t been any solid evidence of who was doing it or where they were headquartered, for lack of a better word. Until now. 

Frustrating as it was to have to get the information from an arrogant piece of shit like Ghost Face, at least now they had _something_. 

“Is there anything that far out?” 

“Probably. Old grounds. Shit that doesn’t get used any more.” And, he knew, there were passages to places even they shouldn’t go. Technically the void was a breath away from them all the time, but it was a lot easier to fall into it out there. “It breaks down. Gets destroyed.” 

“I wonder why he was out there.” 

“Who cares?” 

A smile flashed across Anna’s face at that. 

“Will we need to fight?” 

“Don’t think so. He said it was a stray maggot. One of us’d probably be enough.” 

“But two will go.” He glanced at her; she hefted her axe. “They have proven dangerous enough to chain us up without a fight. If we go together, they will not have that chance.” 

It wasn’t a bad idea. He remembered waking up in an unfamiliar place, chained to the ground, his broken, twisted weapon just out of reach - and then nothing. Whoever was doing all this had a hell of an arm on them, or at least a grasp on drugs that rivaled both Carter and that damn carnie. But no amount of strength was going to take down two at once - especially not when it was him and Anna. 

“Do you think he lied?” she asked, drawing Evan back to the present, and he considered it. 

“Probably not,” he said after a while. “I think he finally figured out this place isn’t all fun and games.” 

“The Entity should have taught him that long ago.” 

“Some people are slow learners.” 

She smirked briefly, which he ignored. They rounded the edge of the forest and made their way back toward the lodge, which looked as cold and desolate as ever. 

“How much longer you willing to wait?” 

“Until two of them are back on their feet.” Anna hefted her axe and glared at the forest ahead of them. “From there, they will have enough strength to protect each other. Rin will watch over them.” 

“She’s willing?” 

“Willing enough.” 

He stayed a little while longer, pacing the edges of the snowy forest with Anna in silence, before heading back into the fog. If they were going to go hunting, he needed to get ready. 

To his surprise Philip was by the mine when he arrived, watching the forest around him with his constant blank gaze, but that unseeing attention landed on Evan as soon as he came into view. 

“You need something?” he asked. 

“The blight’s passed,” Philip said dryly. “Much sooner than I expected.” 

“Go talk to Carter. I’m sure he can theorize to hell and back.” 

“I don’t need theories. Someone took half the flowers in the yard.” 

Evan pushed past him into the mine, then paused. 

“Took them?” 

“Cut them off at the base.” 

He didn’t turn. That was different. Under the circumstances, worryingly so. 

“You sure it wasn’t Carter?” 

“He wouldn’t set foot in my ‘territory’ to save his life,” Philip said, the inverted commas dropping down almost visibly in his usually flat tone. “What did Ghost Face say?” 

“That he was on the edge when he got caught.” Now Evan did turn partway, watching Philip closely for even the slightest hint of something hidden. “You know about anything different out there?” 

Philip’s expression didn’t change. Between him and Evan, the fog held few secrets - or at least, it _should have_ held few secrets. Evan had a dangerous bond with the Entity; Philip had a dangerous tendency to wander. And then shit like this happened, and they were both at a loss. 

“Different, no,” he said after a few seconds. “It’s nothing but abandoned places collapsing in on themselves.” 

“Nowhere someone could hide outside the Entity’s reach?” 

“I’d be surprised. But … it’s not impossible.” 

An unsatisfying answer, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Evan grimaced, and turned back to the path under the mine. 

“We’re gonna hunt the bastard down,” he said. “Me and Anna. Bring him back in pieces and let this place sort him out.” 

“You may need help.” 

“Fuck that. Or were you gonna offer?” 

Philip almost smiled at that. 

“What good would I be when the two of you carry that much firepower?” 

Evan snorted, and headed to his workshop. He knew Philip would linger for a while, watching and listening, but by the time he’d gotten his blade ready and a few more traps primed, there was nothing outside but the dying forest he called his own.  
  


* * *

  
At the edge of his property, Evan watched Anna sharpen her axe as the two of them waited. 

It had been a while. All traces of the blight had faded by now - not just the ones taken outright from the wrecking yard, but the ones that grew everywhere else, too. Adiris had finally been able to come out of her temple without risking burns, though personally Evan doubted it would have made much of a difference. 

There hadn’t been any other attacks, though some interesting rumors had come from the maggots, of all things. Something about a killer that was half-blight. Some poor idiot who’d run into whoever they were about to hunt? Or something the Entity had spat out at the end of its terrible purge? He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. None of _them_ had run into it, or even seen a trace of it. 

Anna looked over the gleaming edge of her weapon with a critical eye. Then her head turned, ears and nose picking up things it took Evan a few more seconds to recognize. 

Ghost Face strolled out of the darkness as casually as ever. 

He’d recovered. The black leather was back, as were the straps that floated lazily in the air around him. Outwardly, there was no indication he’d ever seen a hint of the blight serum coursing through his veins, but Evan knew the rage and lingering horror pulsed through him like fire - the same fire that had burned him from the inside out. 

“Nice of you to wait for me.” 

“You’re leading,” Evan said. 

“I thought you might decide to go ahead and find it on your own. Guess you really did need my help.” 

“Wouldn’t be able to find it,” he sneered. “I’m not dumb enough to go where I’m not welcome for fun.” 

Anna snorted. Ghost Face watched them for a long, silent second, then stepped past them toward the fog curling in the distance. 

“Hurry up.” 

They followed him. For once, he didn’t try to vanish, pulling the fog and shadows around him to hide, or even pick up the pace and dart out of sight to throw them off for a while. The set of his shoulders said frustration, irritation, _insult_ , but he was corralling it long enough to find their goal. It was an admirable demonstration of self-control, and so to Evan was proof that despite all his talk Ghost Face was still shaken by what had happened. 

Or maybe by the threat Evan had laid out - the idea that his attacker might come back for _him_ , uniquely and deliberately. 

“Getting anything?” he asked Anna under his breath. She shook her head. 

“Not yet.” Her attention was focused ahead, on the fog just past Ghost Face. “Too much fog.” 

The three of them walked in silence. The pathways through the fog were insubstantial, inconsistent. It was easier to find a feeling and follow it. He could sense the volcanic anger that marked the Coldwind farm, the spark of terror and agony that crackled along every wall of the institute, the haunting of vengeance in Glenvale, and even the bottomless pit of a feeling he could only call _repentance_ in that godawful crumbling school. 

But none of those would turn up a stray maggot that wanted to see them suffer. 

Ghost Face never hesitated. He shifted paths a few times, but he didn’t stop walking; if he was uncertain about his path, he didn’t show it. He took his time, though, and eventually Evan spoke up. 

“You sure you know where you’re going?” 

“Why wouldn’t I?” 

“Seems to me you’re lost.” 

“Nothing’s nailed down around here.” The reply was terse and sharp, a hint that the mask was still cracked; Evan smirked. “I know exactly what I’m looking for. I just need to make sure I find it without landing us all in the Entity’s lap.” 

“That’s a hell of an ego you’ve got if you think it’d let _you_ do that.” 

“So I’ve been told.” 

Anna didn’t laugh this time, but she turned to look at Evan, smirking right back at him. 

Ghost Face must have been _really_ nervous to brush off a direct attack on his self-worth. He kept up his pace, stalking through the fog, fingers curled into fists at his sides. 

Evan didn’t push further. Maybe once they got somewhere, but while they were still looking, he’d let the idiot lead the way without any more distractions. 

The fog twisted and turned as they walked through it. The constant chill lingered on his skin. But after a while, he started to pick up on something unfamiliar - something he couldn’t quite place. Which meant they were probably getting close to their target. 

He’d barely turned his head to mention something to Anna when the fog fled, leaving the world around them dark and strangely huge. Looking up he saw distant clouds, so dark gray they were almost black, and in the distance there were silhouettes of what had to be buildings, just barely showing against a persistent orange light that came from nowhere. 

All around them was dead ground and broken fences. Fancy ones, though, wrought iron and burned black. In the near distance he could see what looked like graves, some broken and some still mostly whole. He didn’t bother going to look at them; he wasn’t interested in seeing if they had names on them, and a part of him was uneasy about the idea that if they _did_ , he might recognize some. 

Ahead of them was a mausoleum. It was strangely well-maintained for what they usually found in the Entity’s realm, but it was possible that was more just luck than anybody actually taking their time to make sure it stayed in one piece. 

Ghost Face was staring at it, hands still curled into fists. The straps on his coat flicked in the air. 

“This the right place?” Evan asked. 

“Yes.” Tight and terse. It made him smirk. Anna wandered away from the two of them to look at the fences and nearest graves, still holding her axe in a ready position. 

“Show me what happened.” 

Forcibly uncurling his hands, Ghost Face pointed to the mausoleum. One door was partly open, but other than that, there was no sign anybody was around. 

“That was the only place worth looking at. I went in. Looked around. Found something on the floor and when I tried to get a better look, he got me.” 

“‘Something’?” Evan echoed. 

“A burn.” 

“Stone doesn’t burn.” 

“A scorch, then,” Ghost Face said acidly. “Want to have a look for yourself?” 

He went. Anna followed them, half-turned to look back the way they came, but once they were all inside the mausoleum she shut the doors and joined them. 

There _was_ a scorch on the floor, a drip of something that had blackened the gray stone in a way Evan had only seen done by either acid or molten metal. He scuffed the spot with the toe of his boot; it didn’t so much as smear. 

“It’s not leading anywhere. I didn’t have any time to look around to see what might have done it.” 

Anna looked up. Evan followed suit a second later. Above them was nothing but the high domed roof, the tops of the columns either empty or decorated by a statue of a crow. They were clearly stone, posed with wings spread and beaks open, without a hint of any kind of inner light to suggest there was something more to them than they could see, but they made him uneasy anyway. 

Crows were extensions of the Entity, after all - the only animal it had ever managed to understand enough to bring into the fog. 

“Ain’t blood.” 

“Obviously.” 

“Not blight, either.” 

“You’re sure?” 

“Would’ve left a worse mark, or no mark.” 

It scourged the earth it touched, and burned through everything else. A strange scorch like this wouldn’t be all it left behind. Plus, why just one place? If someone hurt or blighted had come through this way, there should have been a trail. 

But Anna sniffed the air, looked down at the mark, and scowled. 

“Both,” she said. 

The two of them looked at her. Evan had long since learned not to doubt her sense of smell, and Ghost Face was probably still too off-kilter to find a sharp one-liner to dismiss her with. But … 

“How?” 

“Blight burned the blood. Pooled and stuck.” She turned her axe over and scraped the edge of the blade over the mark; at the very edge, a piece flaked off, taking a little stone with it. “Something was injured.” 

“Something? The fucker responsible for all this, I hope.” But that was bitterness talking, even if Evan agreed. 

“Doubt it.” He turned to look around at the rest of the room, which was empty of any other marks or blemishes. “Maybe came from the last idiot who went wandering around here.” 

“Can I remind you that I’m the only reason you found this place at all?” 

“Doesn’t make you not an idiot.” 

He saw Ghost Face reach for his knife, and lifted his cleaver warningly. The hand paused an inch from the hilt. 

“We can handle it from here,” he warned. “Don’t need you around to fuck it up.” 

“You think _I’ll_ fuck it up?” There was a laugh, short and hollow. “You? The man who can’t even finish a trial properly if someone breaks out of one of his traps?” 

Evan lifted the cleaver a little higher, the tip of it pointed directly at Ghost Face’s mask. It wouldn’t take him much effort to slam it down and through the mask if he wanted to - and Ghost Face didn’t have very far to run inside the mausoleum. 

“I’m not the one who got caught,” he said flatly, and watched the black-gloved hand curl into a fist. 

“Not _this_ time.” 

It was a hiss, cold and dark and dangerous, hinting at what was hiding under the leather and human skin that kept Ghost Face in one piece. But where a survivor might have recoiled from the threat in it, Evan only snorted, feeling his own temper start to surge at the reminder. 

Anna, who hadn’t said a word since the argument started and was as likely to let them gut each other as she wasn’t any other time, shifted her axe so the steel of the axehead scraped against the stone floor. Both men looked at her, and she tilted her head, her mouth a thin line of impatience. 

“Later?” she didn’t quite ask, and it was Evan who stood first, and who ignored the snide little sound Ghost Face made as he slowly followed suit. 

It was clear the mausoleum wasn’t going to lead them anywhere. A few attempts to find hidden pathways or doors got them nowhere. Eventually they made their way back out into the strange crumbling landscape. 

“So where from here?” he asked, mostly rhetorically, as the black and orange sky moved above them. 

“I don’t know.” There was a thin veneer of impatience to Ghost Face’s words as he strolled past them both to stop at the edge of the mausoleum’s fencing. “I was unconscious. Drugged, actually.” 

“You didn’t mention that before.” 

“It wasn’t relevant.” The straps on Ghost Face’s coat, normally lazy and almost insulting in the way they moved, were lower down now, drifting closer to his body. “Besides, how else do you think he got _you?_ He’s got access to facilities here. Or at least he’s cobbled something together. Unless certain other killers are even less trustworthy than we thought.” 

The accusation wasn’t unfamiliar. Time and again Evan had suspected some of the others of being disloyal to the Entity - more disloyal than was normal, anyway - but the idea that they might be working with stray meat to try and attack other killers seemed ridiculous. Plus, the only ones he would have suspected had already seen the wrong side of a needle at this point. 

“There’s been shit here before any of us. Probably took most of that.” 

“That’d be nice.” Ghost Face turned to look out at the shadowy silhouettes of this part of the Entity’s realm as they approached, leaving the mausoleum behind. “Very naïve of _you_ , of all people.” 

Evan turned to look at him. 

“I’m just saying. You’ve never struck me as the type to assume the best of anyone.” 

“You never struck me as someone to stop payin’ attention, but here we are.” 

“I can’t pay attention if I’m _unconscious_.” 

“He got you in the first place. That’s unforgivable.” 

Ghost Face snatched his knife out of its sheathe; Evan had his cleaver between them by the time it was out in the air. 

“He got every one of us,” came the hiss, like a death rattle. “You don’t get to accuse _me_ of anything when you couldn’t even keep yourself in one piece.” 

“I don’t pride myself on being a ghost.” Evan watched Ghost Face, knowing that the advantage didn’t lie with the man who needed to sneak up on people. Speed wasn’t going to save him here, either. Anna _would_ fight on Evan’s side, if she fought on anyone’s at all. 

“Because you couldn’t even _start_ to understand what it takes to do what I do.” For all his anger, Ghost Face was rigidly still; the only moving parts of him were the straps. “If he’s meat, he’s got the Entity on his side. It wants him to get us. It _wants_ us to end up like we did.” 

“Bullshit,” snarled Evan, but the words curled uneasily in the back of his skull, mixing with his own private thoughts on the matter. 

“Why else would we end up like that? Don’t try to pretend you don’t think the same thing, or you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.” 

“Watch it.” The constant rage he lived with surged and seethed, ready to smash Ghost Face’s skull in and let him bleed out in the furthest corners of the fog, wondering briefly if he’d ever come back from that. 

“He’s using _its_ fucking purge to do this to us. It’s supposed to control this place. It should be able to stop him. So why not? Why let him run wild and fuck with _us_ like we’re the meat?” 

“You don’t understand shit,” Evan said, more evenly than he expected to. “This place isn’t as simple as you want to believe it - ” 

“Evan,” Anna said suddenly, interrupting him. 

“What?” he snapped. 

There was a _thump_ \- a sound of something hitting the ground. Heavy enough to be a body but not so heavy it splattered, though there was an odd _squish_ to the edge of the sound. 

Both men turned. 

_Something_ was standing in front of the mausoleum. It looked like a human at first. Or at least, it had a human shape. Hooded, hunchbacked, and armed with something that looked like a cane, it didn’t look particularly stable overall. 

That might have had something to do with the hunch, which on a second look wasn’t just a deformity but was in fact a festering pustule of blight tumors. They glowed eerily under the torn cloak, familiar enough to make Evan’s blood boil. Some of them were leaking, leaving orange trails over skin and clothing to drip onto the ground with a _hiss._

It was looking at them. Or at least in their direction. The eyes glowed as bright orange as anything blight-infested as he’d ever seen, standing out against the shadows cast by the torn hood. 

Part of him was expecting words, but they never came. They couldn’t. Where there should have been a mouth was just a torn, gaping hollow in the skin, running from nose to throat, glowing almost as brightly as the eyes, surrounded by serrated skin and dripping blight. 

They all stared, for once frozen by a horror that was normally reserved for survivors. 

“That’s not him,” said Ghost Face suddenly, his voice so flat Evan knew he was fighting back his own fear. 

“He’s wearing a hood.” 

“That’s _not_ him.” Snapped, sharp and hard, anger and something like fear twisting into the words. “That shithead was openly mocking me. Does that thing look like it can talk?” 

“Same smell,” Anna murmured, shifting her grip on her axe. “Almost the same. As the others.” 

“You’re sure?” 

“Yes.” She barely moved, even to speak. “Mold. Acid. Burnt. Others.” She bared her teeth at the shuddering, twitching thing standing across from them. “And blight.” 

Evan didn’t doubt her sense of smell, and he wasn’t interested in arguing with Ghost Face. He hefted his cleaver. 

“It’s close enough,” he said, so only they could hear. “And it’s in the way.” 

The thing shifted, standing up slightly straighter, and then it charged them. _Fast._

They dodged out of the way, a swipe with the cane just missing Evan. It blew past them and staggered to a halt just out of reach, turned, and charged in again. 

A memory flickered up in Evan’s head as he avoided cane swipes and lashed out with his cleaver. The thought he’d had earlier about what he’d picked up from survivors - about a new monster in the fog, one half-blight. If anything matched that, it was this thing, dripping and oozing, every sound it made like the wheezing breath of a dying man. Was this thing really something the Entity allowed to run amok? How could it have managed to catch and infect them like _this?_ It barely seemed to have any awareness of the world around it, except to focus on and attack them. 

It met a blow from him with one of its own and leaned in hard. He stared into the blight-burned eyes, saw pupils, irises, all barely made visible by darker lines in the glowing orange. This _had_ been a person, once - and now it wasn’t. Now it was just a walking infestation. 

Anna hurled a hatchet as it bore down on him. It hit, and what sprayed out was blackened blood that glinted with something bright and orange. Evan flinched back instinctively as some splattered on him and instantly started to burn. 

“It’s all fucking _blight_ ,” he snarled, hurling the thing away from him. The hit and the shove made it reel back, scrabbling at the hatchet where it was buried. 

“How could it - ” 

“Don’t know. Keep your distance.” 

If any hit would just shed blight, that was a problem. Blight-infected blood probably wouldn’t turn them into what they all dreaded, but there was always a chance, and it hurt regardless - he could hear it sizzling on his mask, and there were speckles of it on his skin, leaving red burns behind. He’d have to fight from as far as he could. Anna would have the best chance of killing it. 

Ghost Face, on the other hand, was going to be in trouble. And he knew it. He was circling the thing as it ripped the hatchet out of its back, trying to find a way to get in close without risking getting caught. His tiny knife pretty much demanded he be in grabbing range to use it effectively, and Evan had never seen him throw it - which would disarm him anyway. Despite the gravity of the situation, he smirked to himself. 

The idiot made a lunge, just in time for the thing to turn and try to hit him with the cane. They both landed and it was Ghost Face who backed off first. Blight smoked on his sleeve, and his knife glittered with it. He put as much distance between himself and the thing as he could without being too far to strike. 

But their shared enemy backed off, too, staggering away to keep them all out of range, except for Anna, who was already raising another hatchet. It reached into its tattered cloak and pulled out - 

All three of them moved back, Ghost Face almost tripping over himself to get out of range. There was a syringe in its hand, loaded with neon blight serum, and immediately the dots started connecting in Evan’s head. If it had just been attacked by the same person they were hunting, why would it have the same syringes they’d seen before? This _was_ their target - but in the time between when Ghost Face had been caught and now, it had … changed. 

Or Ghost Face had been under more drugs than just the ones that knocked him out. 

Evan expected to see the syringe come at one of them, so it was a surprise to see the thing get a thumb on the end of the plunger, twist its hand, and jam the needle into its own stomach. 

There was a strangely familiar _hiss_ and then the orange light pulsing out of the thing surged. It jerked. Made a strange sound, like the shredded vocal cords were still in there, trying to make some kind of agony known. 

Then it charged again. 

It _ran_ , faster than he’d expected, almost as fast as he’d seen Legion go when they were trying to get away from him. He jerked to the side just in time to avoid it and it hit one of the fences past him, hard enough to send blight splattering to the ground. But instead of stopping it in its tracks it wheeled around, caught sight of him and charged _again_ without losing any speed, and this time it hit him, cane out, aimed directly for the throat. 

The pain tore through him but he glared into the crazed, torn face, the eyes gleaming with blight, and even as he staggered back his cleaver came up and out. 

It hit the ribs at the same time as Anna’s hatchet landed in its spine. Blighted blood soaked them both and the ground around them. It made another groaning, hissing sound and reeled to the side, staggering but not collapsing. 

Ghost Face took that moment to lunge in and slice at the back of the thing’s knee, effectively hobbling it, only to get a cane blow to the mask for it. He rolled away in time to avoid a second hit. That was when Anna came in, gripping her axe at the furthest end of the shaft, swinging the blade down hard so it slammed into the thing’s ribs where Evan’s cleaver had left a bloody rip. 

It should have collapsed. Should have gone down without another word, twisting and writhing on the ground, scrambling for an escape with nowhere to go. But it barely dropped, the injured leg folding while the other stayed up. It was _still standing._ Like the pain was barely registering with it. 

Like the blight had consumed its entire world. 

The idea felt familiar. 

It reeled toward Ghost Face, who scrambled to get away as it came after him. Anna dragged her axe around and slammed it back into the thing’s ribs again, this time on the other side, sending it rolling and leaving a trail of blood that glinted orange. Evan closed in and swiped at it, missing it by inches, as it pulled back and fought to put distance between them. 

Was it capable of realizing when it was about to lose? Death in the fog was temporary, and this thing sure as shit didn’t seem to understand when it was on the verge of getting cut in half. Maybe there was some fragment of self-preservation instinct left in the ruined mess of its brain. 

It was clearly trying to judge what to do next, head turning between the three of them. It could see a weak point - the closest-range fighter among them, who was also the most spooked by its presence just because of how recently he’d been blighted. Anna knew that as well as Evan did, and the two of them tried to cover the distance that should have taken three without letting it escape between them. 

It grabbed the nearest fence and hauled itself up, dripping blood and blight. It pulled out another syringe, jammed it into its gut and tossed the empty glass away. The light surged again, flickering and getting brighter everywhere they could see it, and both Evan and Anna lifted their weapons, ready for another charge, a sudden strike that something this strange might send out of nowhere. 

This time, when it attacked, it took them both off guard after the first hit. The cane crashed into his cleaver and the thing bounced off before he could shove it back, used the momentum to turn and charge at Anna who was halfway to it. She tried to block and staggered back at the hit, only for it to go for Evan again. This time he swiped and sent it in a whole different direction, ricocheting off the nearest fence to come right back for another hit. 

It went on for a while - for too long. Each of them trying to corner it and ending up missing when it hit something and went in an entirely new direction. Even Ghost Face tried to land a blow and nearly got bowled over when the handle end of the cane caught in his hood on a near miss. But like before, he wasn’t fighting properly. Too scared to get in close and risk a syringe to the throat. Too unused to _fighting_ , instead of just killing, to do anything right. 

He could shut him down later. For the moment Evan focused on trying to catch the thing when it finally slowed and reached for another syringe, lashing at its bleeding back. It turned at the last second and his blade caught the tumors on its shoulder. 

They _sprayed_ when he hit them. The thing almost made a real sound, staggering away, but Evan couldn’t chase it - blight was raining down on him, burning whatever it touched, making the metal impaled in his arm twist and melt and deform. Anna grabbed him by the other elbow and yanked him out of range in time for the thing to turn and stare at them both. 

It shuddered, back and chest and shoulders heaving with pain as it tried to breathe - if it was even breathing at all - before it charged. _Again._ This time both Evan and Anna dived aside to let it go past them, Anna turning with her axe up to ready another defense or maybe a final blow that would cave its ribs in and actually stop it for once. 

But the thing kept going. It hit the fence, ricocheted off in another direction where there was a break in the metal and took off into the distance. The glow of the blight was visible in the fog for a while before the darkness closed in around it, leaving the three of them alone in the shadows of the strange, crumbling edge of the Entity’s realm, with nothing but blood and blight burns and footprints to prove it had ever been there. 

Cautiously, Evan picked himself up and grimaced as his fresh burns pulled in painful directions. Anna was still watching the distance in case the thing came back, and Ghost Face had pushed himself to his feet and was picking at the burned places on his coat like they were nothing more than an inconvenience and he hadn’t just recoiled from a fight out of a fear he couldn’t handle. 

Once he was sure there wasn’t about to be an explosion of fresh blight pouring out of him, Evan made his way over to where the thing had tossed one of its syringes and picked it up. It looked familiar enough, but on a closer inspection there were … differences. It was smoother. Like it had been formed out of one piece, instead of metal fitted over the ends of glass. There was a little blight still pooled in the bottom that slid down the glass as he turned it over to inspect the needle end. 

The metal gleamed like brass, but there was a second, sickly gleam in there, too. More red-purple, a strange color to find in something like this. The glass glinted without so much as a crack even though it had been flung aside hard. 

It didn’t look like a manmade thing. It looked … deliberate. Iridescent. _Fog-crafted._ Like the honing stones he kept out of sight to hide their toxic shimmer, only ever used on traps when he was really pissed off and sick of the meat getting out of his trials alive. 

A gift from the Entity. 

“See something?” Ghost Face said, his voice so normal it might have fooled someone else. 

“No.” Evan looked at the back end of the syringe again. The plunger was burnt where a blight-bloodied thumb had hit it. “Just looking.” 

“It’s not coming back. It couldn’t be that stupid. We almost had it.” 

“We?” Evan snorted. “You weren’t part of that. And you were so sure it wasn’t what got you.” 

“It _wasn’t._ That fucker was meat, and I can guarantee it.” The edge of steel was back, which Evan ignored. “Maybe he accidentally got himself with that shit. Or maybe my little shitshow led him right to the Entity, who gave him a taste of his own medicine.” 

“Could be.” 

Anna finally approached, apparently satisfied that the thing wasn’t coming back. She looked down at the syringe in his hand, nose wrinkling in distaste. 

“So,” she said, ignoring Ghost Face, “what now?” 

Evan gave the syringe a long, careful look, the gears in his head turning. They hadn’t been prepared for that thing, and he wasn’t sure how they _could_ prepare for it. Wherever it had run, they might be able to find it, but then they’d be fighting on its territory - if it had territory. 

It wasn’t smart enough to do what their original attacker had done. It didn’t have the strength or the stability for it. But it could fight back, and if it was constantly armed with fresh blight serum, they couldn’t get in that close or risk becoming a danger to everyone around them. 

It was the only lead they had to whoever had attacked them in the first place and was still attacking people now. Their only lead to knowing if the Entity was as much a part of this as he was starting to suspect. 

Evan tossed the syringe away and flicked the last of the blighted blood off his cleaver. 

“I think we’re gonna need backup.”


	3. Chapter 3

There were two temples in the fog: Adiris’s massive stone fortress, and the other one. 

This one was smaller. Not meant to be impressive, he thought, but to bring someone back to their own thoughts. There’d probably been a time when it was properly built and maintained, statues cleaned, wood frames repaired and painted, the sun coming through the leaves above, illuminating paths for people to follow toward the center sanctum. 

These days, it was less friendly. 

Evan had only been here once before, when chasing a stray survivor who’d wandered into his territory while he was out checking traps. They’d run into the fog trailing blood, and he’d followed them through it into the same place he was walking into now. By the time he found them, they’d been cut in half at the waist. 

He’d glared their killer in the eye, or at least mask to mask. But the survivor was dead, and it hadn’t been his territory, so there was no point in arguing; besides that, he’d felt a terrible rage all around him, palpable as his own but somehow more all-encompassing. It seethed like an aura around the monster standing over the survivor’s dead body, and so after a few long moments he’d left to finish his work in a foul mood. 

That had been his only encounter with Kazan. Up until now. 

What he knew of the man was this: he was from hundreds of years before most of them, from a time when the nobility was still a thing, and he held onto his heritage more fiercely than any of them. He was a dangerous swordsman. He had a fury in him that rivaled most of them, though that wasn’t exactly uncommon. And he was related, by blood, to another killer, which was the only instance of it in the fog that Evan had ever heard of. The thought was unsettling in some ways, but so far there hadn’t been any evidence of it happening again. 

He also hadn’t been struck by the blight serum yet. 

Through the paths and up the stairs, Evan made his way to the top of the sanctum, where the man in question was kneeling by a decapitated statue. He looked up at it for a second, then back down to the heavily-armored figure, whose sword was close at hand and whose club was still on his back. 

There was silence for a while before Kazan’s mask turned toward him. 

“Speak,” he said. It sounded more like a command. Evan gave him a long look in silence before deciding to do so. 

“Need your help with something.” 

The mask turned away again. He glared at it anyway. There was less to see there, its eyeholes and mouth worked into the carvings in subtle places, but it had a hell of a lot more emotion on it than his own ever had. 

“My help.” 

“We’re hunting something. Out in the fog.” He gestured, probably uselessly, at the rust-colored mists beyond the temple grounds. “Couldn’t catch it with two of us. Could use your skills to nail it to the ground.” 

“Give me a reason I should.” 

“It’s the thing that attacked your granddaughter.” 

That was the wrong word - there were hundreds of years between the man in front of him and the ghost girl with the broken sword - but it was the closest any of them cared to get, and so far, it hadn’t seemed to bother either one of them. 

As soon as he said it the mask turned sharply to lock onto him. He watched fists curl tight against the man’s knees, a reminder that some families were bound by more than obligation. 

“The fool with the blight?” And there was a roar building up there, under those words. 

“Yeah. Him.” Evan stayed exactly where he was. “More dangerous than we thought he was.” 

“Was he not one of the prey?” 

“Apparently. Might have been before. Now he’s … something else.” 

“So dangerous you cannot catch him.” 

“He might have infected himself.” 

Kazan fell silent. Evan looked out at the temple grounds around them. He’d never been a religious man, and in the fog all belief laid exclusively with the Entity, but something about the place made him just a little uneasy. There was a word for what had happened here, how it had been left, but he couldn’t remember what it was. 

“Tell me what we seek.” 

Another command. Evan felt his fingers tighten around his cleaver. 

“Looks almost like one of the meat,” he said, without looking over. “But hunched. Loaded with blight. Ripped itself open somehow.” With his free hand he gestured at his throat. “Doesn’t have a great weapon, but it’s got a strong arm. And it shoots itself up with serum.” 

“It becomes enraged.” 

“Faster. Doesn’t slow down even if it hits a wall.” Or a person, he thought grimly, or a weapon, dead on. “Not sure if it doesn’t feel pain or just doesn’t care, but it didn’t go down after we got a handful of hits in.” 

“All men fall when they lose a leg.” 

A maple leaf, blown by silent winds, drifted through the air to the platform they were standing on. Evan watched it. It was more orange than red, dark and intense, the delicate lines of veins in it just visible as it landed on the ancient wood; even as he watched, it went brown, then gray, curling up and crumbling into dust. 

It might have been an omen, or a warning. But Evan had long since stopped giving a shit about hints. 

“Very well.” Kazan reached over and picked up his sword, slotting the sheathe back into place on his sword belt. “I will assist you. This creature will suffer for his offenses.” 

“We want it alive, at least to start.” 

“Why.” The mask turned toward him, its perpetual fury making the single stated word into a question. 

“To see if it can tell us something. What made it. How it got here.” He paused, then continued on. Whatever loyalty to the Entity Kazan might have had, Evan knew his went deeper, even now. “If the Entity sent it, or if it’s just another unlucky prick.” 

“You believe the Entity would not just permit this, but cause it?” 

“Hasn’t done anything to stop it.” 

There was a long, tense silence there, one that went unbroken by, for example, a sword coming at his gut. Only because he was right, he knew. The Entity hadn’t intervened to help any of them; it hadn’t intervened to protect the ghost girl. 

And Kazan had never even seen her infested. It was probably for the best that he didn’t. 

“I’ll find you when we’re ready to go.” Evan kept his eyes on the distant, darkened paths, the ones that led from the ruined temple to the ruined house. “Anna’s figuring out the fastest way to find it. Says she can smell something on it.” 

“Make it soon.” Kazan stood, his armor clanking as he got to his feet. “I will not stand idly by and let it strike again if there is even a fragment of a chance of ending its life.” 

“Won’t stick,” Evan pointed out. 

“But perhaps it will learn.” 

Unlikely, thought Evan, but he didn’t say it out loud. Whatever brain was left in that thing was probably rotting into more blight; it probably functioned on instinct alone at this point, plus a stream of instructions and whispers from the Entity. 

The meat knew about it, after all. That meant, if nothing else, that the Entity was making as much use of it as possible. 

As he watched, something pale flickered down the paths, like a series of still images being dragged through the air. He grimaced and turned, heading down the opposite staircase, very much aware of Kazan watching him go and giving the man his back anyway. He wasn’t interested in being part of a family conversation, or getting accused of trying to infect Kazan. Or even listening to her speak at all, her voice echoing and broken, grating on his brain like the broken glass embedded in her flesh. 

In hollow silence, he stalked toward the fog, and that was when the word _profane_ hit him. Right. That was how the place felt. Every holy aspect of it shredded and turned inside out. 

With any luck, that was what would happen to the monster they were hunting.  
  


* * *

“I would have thought you’d ask Caleb.”

“I did.” Two hard blows hammered a dent flat. Evan turned the blade over on the anvil to make sure. “Wasn’t interested.” 

“Not at all?” 

“No.” The blade went back down and took another hit. “Said he didn’t want to risk getting nailed. That he’d get his spear in the thing and it’d come right at him.” 

“It probably would.” 

“Doesn’t make him not a chickenshit.” 

Philip didn’t reply to that, instead watching Evan fix his cleaver in his usual silence. This hunt was going to be a lot more dangerous than the last one, or at least it was intended to be; he wasn’t going to go in with an unprepared weapon and risk a syringe to the back. So he was fixing one of his better cleavers, one he was familiar with and knew how to use best of all. Once the iron was cool, he’d make sure it was sharpened - not to a razor’s edge, like Anna’s axes, but to a ragged, tearing one that left wounds almost impossible to heal. 

“Didn’t think anyone else’d have the balls to do it, either.” He set down the cleaver and hung up the hammer. “Kazan’s got a reason to go after this thing and he’s not afraid of getting hit. Got enough armor to protect himself on top of it.” 

“Maybe.” The word suggested a doubt, which went ignored. Philip tilted his head. “How about the Executioner?” 

Evan glared at him. 

“You ask him,” he snapped. 

“Just wondering.” 

“Nobody wants to see that thing running on blight.” 

“Would it have an effect?” 

“I don’t want to find out.” He turned to damp down the fires in the forge. “You don’t, either.” 

There was no response, which he’d about expected. He finished cleaning up what was left over, kicking shards of metal toward the scrap box and making sure nothing was close enough to catch fire after he left. 

“What will you do, once you have your quarry?” 

Evan gave Philip another long look, and got an even longer one in return. 

“See what the hell it is,” he said. “Bring it somewhere the Entity can see it. See what happens then.” 

“If it goes to trials, the Entity can already see it.” 

“I want an answer. A real answer,” he said, before Philip could interrupt. “If this is the prick who came after us, I want to know for dead fucking certain he’s not going to try it again.” 

“If he’s as insane as you say, he can’t.” 

“I’m not taking that risk.” 

“And if the Entity refuses to say?” 

“Then I’m throwing it in the void.” 

Silence dropped between them again. He picked up the cleaver and checked it; a slower cool kept the metal from going brittle, but he’d never been a patient man. Both men watched as the metal went from orange to dull red. 

“What will you do if you don’t get an answer you like?” 

The question was completely valid, and one he’d been avoiding asking himself. Evan took a careful, steadying breath. 

“We do our job. We’re dedicated. Loyal. Put up with suffering when we fuck up. Never ask for anything when we pull it off. If we’re gonna get rewarded with that kind of torture, then why the hell are we doing this at all?” 

This time the silence was cold and depthless. The question was one that should have ripped open the floor of the workshop and dragged them both into the void - if the Entity had been listening. 

He didn’t get a reply. All he heard was the _plink_ ing of the cleaver as it cooled, and the faintly snarled breathing that caught in Philip’s throat. Then the man was gone, turning and stalking back into the darkness in the tunnel outside the workshop, leaving Evan alone again to debate whether or not his plan was even remotely workable. 

As if they had anything else. 

Later on the ghost girl tried to stop him from going, or at least from taking her grandfather with her when he went. His own well-being wouldn’t have mattered to her in any lifetime. 

“You’ll get him _infected_ ,” she snarled, voice as broken as her body. “You’ll get him _hurt._ ” 

“He’s had worse.” 

“Not like _this!_ ” Something twisted on her face, probably not entirely under her own control. Evan glared at her, unfazed by the distortion the Entity had, for lack of a better word, gifted to her. “You know it’s _different._ You know it’s _worse._ ” 

“I know he’s doing it because of you,” he snapped, and she recoiled with an echo of crunching glass. “To get revenge. Stop it from coming back for you.” 

“Don’t you _dare_ lay this on me!” 

“He made his decision. He wants it dead.” Evan leaned back, knowing she’d lash out from sheer rage and vanish before he could return the favor. “You’d best respect that, unless you want to take his place.” 

She hissed - a long, indrawn breath of hatred and offense - but didn’t say another word, instead staring at him for way too long before disappearing in a shattering of borderline hallucinations. He turned to see where she’d gone, but it was back into the forest - back into the fog. Back to her own home, where she could rail against her grandfather in relative peace. If he’d let her. 

Then … he had to wait. They all did. Anna was on the hunt, not him, and he wasn’t going to go looking until she knew exactly where to strike. Her sense of smell was better. She could sense when things were out of place. And now that she knew what the thing they were hunting smelled and behaved like almost exactly, she could find him. The only thing holding her back was the cold, sterile silence of the fog. 

Trials came and went. He didn’t hear anything new about the all-blight killer, though Ghost Face occasionally mentioned he’d heard this or that. It was never anything useful. Never anything they didn’t already know. 

The Entity remained silent. 

Finally, Anna found him and told him she had it almost pinpointed, but she had to keep on top of it or risk losing it to the fog. She told him in short words where to meet her and vanished again. He picked up his weapon, headed to the shrine, and in short order both he and Kazan were on their way to the hunt. 

The path led him through Adiris’ part of the rainy forest, but she wasn’t going to interfere; she hated the blight infestation as much as the rest of them and was only going to benefit from finding out what it really was. Besides that, she didn’t care if other killers trespassed on her property as long as they didn’t interrupt her or damage her temple. The trees, the long grass, the fallen ruins outside the temple proper - they were fair game. He didn’t pay attention to the world around them as they headed for the far side of the grounds. 

He probably should have. 

“We’re being watched,” said Kazan as they passed the temple itself, and he stopped dead. There was nothing around them but fog, grass, and a set of broken pillars on a stone base, something that might have been a passageway when it was back in the real world - and whole. 

It only took two seconds for Ghost Face to stroll out from behind one of the pillars, looking as calm and casual as ever. 

“The hell are you doing here?” Evan demanded. 

“Going with you. Or did you think you could leave me behind?” 

“You’re useless in a fight. No point in you comin’ with.” 

He saw the man’s shoulders tighten slightly, the straps on his coat flick with something that was probably offense. Evan didn’t move. He wasn’t wrong. 

“I’m the reason you even found him in the first place.” If he was angry, it wasn’t showing in his voice. Ghost Face made his way into the grass, coming between Evan and Kazan. No - _circling_ Evan, like he was some kind of fucking predator. “I’m the one who got you to him. I’m going to be there when you finally lay him out and gut him like the animal he is.” 

“You’re not special.” Evan turned to follow Ghost Face, completely unwilling to give the idiot scavenger his back. “Almost everyone here’s been hit by the blight. We know where to find him. We can track him without you. And like I said: you’re useless in a fight.” 

“Do you want to test that theory?” 

“I saw it. You fucked up.” Evan tightened his grip on his cleaver and turned sharply as Ghost Face moved too far to keep following. “Couldn’t get more than one hit in. Kept running away. You’re a killer. Not a fighter.” 

“And we’re going to kill, aren’t we?” 

“Eventually.” He tilted his head back, looking down on someone who was already shorter than him by a fair margin. “But not ‘til the end. And I’m not going out of my way to keep some scared little shit safe.” 

Ghost Face froze in his stalk, directly between Evan and Kazan. The sense of bloodlust in the air spiked. 

“Scared little shit?” he echoed. 

“You fought like shit because you were too scared of gettin’ hit to do anything worthwhile.” 

He didn’t add _and because you can’t fight for shit in the first place_ , because it wasn’t necessary. The fresh rage between them was already intense enough. 

“This is coming from you? The man too scared of getting his traps busted to finish a trial properly?” 

“That’s not fear, you little shit. You should know the difference.” 

“It’s close enough.” Tension was making Ghost Face rigid, but his hand hadn’t moved behind his back to get his knife - yet. “I’m not _afraid_. You don’t get to try and block me from this based on that. You think you can just leave me here? I can follow you anywhere you go. And you can’t stop me.” 

“Try it. We’ll gut you when we find you. Same as him.” 

“Not if you can’t even see me in time to catch me.” Ghost Face stayed right where he was, the fog curling around his ankles. “This is as much my hunt as anyone else’s. I’m going with you, or you’re going to learn the meaning of regre - ” 

There was a flash of silver and a sound like ripping velvet. Ghost Face stopped mid-word and froze in place; even the straps that forever floated behind him were suddenly rigid in the air. 

He stood there for five seconds, then slowly collapsed, sinking to his knees before the rest of him followed the will of gravity. When he hit the ground, his head rolled a few feet further. 

Evan watched it until it stopped before turning back to Kazan, who flicked the blood off his blade dismissively. 

“We will continue,” he said flatly, resheathing his sword and waiting not particularly patiently for Evan to keep moving. 

They left Ghost Face’s body behind and headed into the endless gray fog. He followed the sense Anna had told him to follow, the one that most reminded him of _her_ , through otherwise identical pathways. Heavy footsteps behind him told him he hadn’t lost Kazan, but he knew that like him, the man only had so much patience; this pace wouldn’t keep him in check forever. Eventually, _something_ had to die. Ghost Face wouldn’t have sated much bloodlust. 

They found her at the edge of a broken realm. Somewhere that some killer, at some time, had inhabited, until it couldn’t obey the Entity’s will anymore and was - disposed of. None of them liked being in a place like this. It reminded them of the conditions of their conditional immortality. _Obey, or else._

Anna was half in the fog, her own impatience almost visible. She didn’t relax when she saw them but she did look around, craning her neck to see if anyone was following them. 

“No ghost?” she asked. 

“No. He’s not coming.” 

“I’m surprised. After his last insistence … ” 

“He tried.” Evan gestured at Kazan, who was staring around at the half-broken realm they were on the edge of. “Didn’t last more than thirty seconds.” 

Anna almost smiled, but her attention didn’t linger on dead men. She looked into the fog and automatically shifted her grip on her axe. It was one of the simpler ones, he noticed. Nothing more than a strong oak shaft with a solid iron axehead, one that had been sharpened, as he expected, to a razor’s edge. No decoration. No ornamentation. Just a weapon for killing, ready to do its job. 

“I can smell it. It came through here. Touched nothing, just ran.” 

“No blood?” 

“No. It healed.” 

“Recently?” 

“Enough.” 

Heavy steps brought Kazan to them. He glared into the fog; one hand reached up to grab the handle of his frankly unnecessarily huge club, but he didn’t draw it yet. 

“Which way?” 

“This way.” Anna took a step into the fog, then turned back to glare at both of them. “Follow me. Do not stray. You will lose your path, or die.” 

Kazan snorted. Evan said nothing. She watched them with a critical eye, then made her way into the fog; a second later, they followed. 

“How is she so sure?” asked Kazan, in a voice Evan knew Anna would overhear but might not listen to. 

“She’s a hunter. Knows how to find prey.” 

“Few among us are not hunters.” 

“Even when it’s not bleedin’.” 

“I have hunted more dangerous quarry than we have ever been faced with,” was the response, almost but not quite a snarl. “I chased wolves into their dens. I cut down wild boar when they gutted other men. I traveled to remote lands to hunt their terrible _Oyamaneko_ and destroy a scourge of their people. No beast ever escaped my sword or bow.” 

“On your own?” 

There was a second of silence, which was a good enough answer for Evan. 

“Leading a hunting party makes no difference.” 

“Makes all the difference.” Evan had rarely hunted alone until the later days of his life. Even with one other person, there was a change in the way the world reacted. In the way the prey reacted. “You had other people’s eyes. Dogs. Horses. Whatever the hell it is you hunted with. She knows how to follow something into its own den without it ever knowing ‘til the axe is in its head. And she’s been here longer than you.” 

“Not longer than you.” 

“I’m - not a specialist.” _Not as good a hunter_ was what he probably should have said, but his pride would never let the words out. “And we’re not hunting an animal.” 

“From what you’ve said, it may as well be one.” 

“No. It’s too smart.” He paused again and shook his head. “Too reckless. Too stupid. Only something rabid or cornered fights back when it’s injured. This thing’s human. Won’t give up.” 

He could feel the seething rage behind him, but for once, Kazan managed to hold himself in check. Either he’d recognized Evan was right or, more likely, he was saving it up for the actual fight. 

Anna’s silhouette faded in and out of the fog in front of him. He focused on her, ignoring the flickers and hints around him. Things crunched or cracked underfoot, then disappeared; noises echoed like distant gunshots, running from one side of the fog to the other and just barely reaching them on the way. 

Overhead, the fog opened up once or twice to a deep blue or twilit sky. They were passing through places that had been and might be. He tried to ignore them. They weren’t important. 

When the fog finally fled they were in a place that looked eerily like the last one. A sky pitch black above that faded to orange at the horizons, but most of the horizons were hidden by looming silhouettes and shadows of things that might have been buildings and might have been mountains. Around them, though, was nothing: just empty land, devoid of even the gravestones from before. There _was_ a single shack, though. Familiar but unfamiliar at the same time. 

The three of them stared at it in silence. The walls were high and made of cracking panels. There was an open doorway, the door itself splintered and hanging off a hinge. Acrid smoke drifted out from somewhere they couldn’t see, the smell sharp in the air against a background scent of nothing at all. The place looked … old, like everything in the fog. Decaying. Rotting. Falling apart. 

But fog drifted around the foundation, the same way it sometimes sank through the grounds and into his workshop, leaving him with the opportunity to squeeze it into something useful. A single dull honing stone, coated in fog and put under pressure, could become something godawful - for the maggots. 

“This is it,” said Anna, but Evan could hear a note of uncertainty in her voice, and Kazan didn’t miss it either. 

“It may not be,” he growled. 

“He _is_ here,” she snarled, tightening her grip on her axe. “Or he will be. This is his home. His … place.” 

“This is abandoned,” Evan said, and she shot him a look. “By the Entity. It’s falling apart. Same as last time. He set up shop in a place that might kill him?” 

“ _We_ will kill him.” Kazan strode past them toward the open doorway, already drawing his sword. 

Evan didn’t bother correcting him, pointing out that the inevitable collapse into the Void was what would kill the bastard they were looking for. It wouldn’t make a difference. He followed him instead, fog swirling around his ankles; he heard Anna keep just behind him, her attention on the world around them instead of what was in front. 

Splintered pieces of the door made a path to the inside of the shack. And inside was … tables, some along the walls and some standing free, though those ones had been knocked over. There was broken glass all over the floor; distant orange light through the broken panels made it glitter as they ground it underfoot. There were burned patches. There was twisted metal. There was a mattress, stained and musty, in a corner. 

There was no sign of blood or even blight. But when Evan sniffed the air, he could pick up on the smell he remembered from the fight. Something he couldn’t place but - sharp, acrid like acid but alive like moss. It _was_ here, somewhere. Or it had been. 

Kazan strode through the little room, kicking fallen tables and hurling the ones still standing to the ground. He punched a wall; the panels cracked under his fist. 

“This is a fool’s errand.” There wasn’t so much of a trickle as a torrent of rage running under his words. “We have come this far for nothing. I will find this beast on my own!” 

Evan gave him a look, the actual expression lost under the perpetual grin of his mask. Anna glanced between them from her spot in the doorway. 

“How?” he asked, nudging the mattress with a foot. 

“Like a true hunter.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Anna shift her axe, but Kazan reached up, one hand gripping the hilt of his club too tightly. “By drawing it out and cornering it. Not stalking through shadows to find it where it lies.” 

“It will attack you first,” Anna snarled. “And it will poison you.” 

“My armor will never give way to a mere needle.” 

“Your arms are bare. So is your throat.” She bared her teeth, the sure sign of a fight about to erupt. “When you go mad, what do we tell your granddaughter? That you were too stupid to - ” 

Kazan _roared_ and ripped the club free, slamming it into the ground between them. Anna jumped back out of instinct; even Evan grabbed the nearest broken spot in the wall to stay upright. It felt like the whole floor was about to cave in, and - 

All three of them looked down to where the club had gone right through the wooden floor. Glass fell in a glittering stream through the hole, orange torchlight giving them a hint as to what might be down there before it vanished into pitch darkness. 

Carefully, Kazan pulled the club back, but when the rest of the floor didn’t collapse under them he made for the door. 

A brief investigation led them to a set of storm doors behind the shack, as rotting and useless as anything else in the fog. Evan kicked them in and descended into darkness that eventually gave way to a smoky light. Kazan followed while Anna stayed up above, keeping watch in case their prey returned. 

Underneath the shack was a dark, dank place, dug out of the earth, the walls packed tight. There was another overturned table down here, and something big and metal lying on the floor. The hole above them didn’t give much light to see by, but Evan felt along it for any clues and figured it was some kind of chair. Broken and twisted out of shape, but burned, too, pieces melted away. 

Kazan grabbed a smoking torch out of a holder and stalked further away. There were halls and rooms down there, it looked like, but Evan stayed in the main room. Glass crunched underfoot as he looked around. There was more glass down here. More twisted metal. More things that, on closer inspection, looked like they might have been used for some kind of science experiment. And there was paper - shredded, crumpled, half-burned or just filthy, littered everywhere. 

He picked up a sheet and tried to read it. The handwriting on it was so crabbed and narrow he couldn’t understand a word of it. Things were written in shorthand or code, too. Only the numbers were clear, and those didn’t have any meaning without the words around them. 

The others were the same. Frustrated, Evan gave up and headed down the hall to where Kazan had gone and found the man standing still, staring at the far wall. Evan looked to see what had stopped him, and went just as still. 

“So,” said Kazan after a few moments of silence, “if he was here, he has already been found.” 

Evan said nothing. 

“And he has been driven out.” The rage was still there, but muted. “Our interference was not necessary.” 

“Don’t think this was recent.” 

“So you say.” 

“I _know_.” Evan almost reached out to the black-burned earth, scorched in an eerily familiar shape. “He used to be here. He did his work here. Got found out. Ran. But … keeps comin’ back.” 

Drawn by something. An old instinct? A fragment of a memory that stuck around after whatever happened to him? Anna had said it: _this is his place._ Or at least it used to be. 

“There’s nothing of worth here. Why return?” 

He didn’t respond. Partly he wasn’t sure; partly he had a suspicion, and it wasn’t a good one. After all, after every trial, they went back to their own realms, their own pockets in the fog, almost automatically. No matter where they ended up and no matter what they had to do, they went right back to where they belonged - 

There was a scream like steam being torn through a human throat, and then something hit a wall so hard the whole shack above them rattled. Both men turned sharply, Kazan looking up, Evan looking back the way they’d come. 

It had come back. 

Neither one of them said a word. They ran for the exit, to get back above ground and deal with this thing before it could escape again. He heard Anna yell, heard her draw and hurl a hatchet, but there was no sickening _splutch_ or resultant barely-human scream of pain, which meant it had ricocheted off in another direction before she nailed it. 

Evan made it upstairs seconds after Kazan did. He rounded the corner of the shack and saw the thing again, hurtling itself toward Anna, who dodged out of the way almost a second too late. 

Kazan, to his credit, didn’t ask questions or try to claim what he was seeing couldn’t be real. He stared at it for two full seconds before drawing his sword and charging in, nearly knocking Anna over as he headed straight for the thing that was wheeling around with a syringe in hand. Less to his credit was the fact that he didn’t stop on seeing that. But he hadn’t faced one yet. Hadn’t had it jammed into his skin, forcibly held in place by metal welded to the body, felt the searing agony of blight serum pulsing through his veins. He wouldn’t be afraid of it. He wouldn’t even consider being afraid of it. 

“Idiot’s going to get himself injected,” Evan snarled as he made his way over to Anna, who’d picked up her fallen hatchet and was already aiming again. 

“No,” she said, voice tight with distracted tension. “It has not aimed for us. Only itself. It could have poisoned us easily before.” 

“I don’t buy that.” 

“It does not have the mind to waste its only source of power on someone else.” 

She hurled the hatchet; it missed both Kazan and the blight-burned thing by an inch. Kazan was trying to cut it down, but it kept avoiding his blows; every time he tried to predict where it was going to be it hit something, whether the shack of Kazan himself, and took off in an entirely different direction. Evan watched as a sword stroke was knocked aside by a wildly-flung cane on a close pass. 

“This ain’t working,” he growled. 

Anna said nothing, only drew another hatchet and waited. He watched the fighting pair. All of Kazan’s training had taught him how to fight people who knew how to fight back, who fought the way _he_ did; faced with something like this, that probably didn’t even know what the hell it was doing, was rendering all those years of training pointless. You couldn’t predict something that fought like it didn’t care if it was going to die. 

It probably _didn’t_. 

“We need to surround it,” Anna hissed, and threw the hatchet. This time it caught the thing on the arm, sending it spinning around, and Kazan took the opportunity to land a blow on its back. 

Even he recoiled from the spray of orange-glinting blood that erupted. The thing screamed in its weird hissing way and took off toward the shack, slamming into a wall and staggering to a halt. 

Anna made her way toward it. Evan approached Kazan, intending to share the one-sentence plan they had that probably wouldn’t work, when he saw the man flick the blood off his blade and extend his left hand toward the blood on the ground. He opened his palm, something red bubbling up off the skin, and as he watched the glittering blood on the ground started to lift up toward the man’s open hand. 

Evan knew, begrudgingly, that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. School had ended at thirteen; everything else he knew he learned firsthand, usually from his father. He could hunt, he could kill, he could command fear and dole out violence and pain, but his strategies and tactics began and ended at the hunt. The intelligence he’d had had been wasted through years of blood and hatred dulling him down into what the Entity had eventually dragged into the fog. 

But watching Kazan draw the blood toward himself made every neuron fire off at once, painting a picture of the immediate future that was going to turn this into a shitshow like he’d never imagined. 

He lunged in, blade out, and slammed the flat of it into the open palm. Kazan jerked away and the blood splashed back to the ground. 

“You would _dare_ \- ” 

“You wanna end up infected?” Evan demanded. “The hell do you think’s going to happen if you take that?” 

Kazan stared at him, and then it clicked even for him. The monster’s blood would be as bad as a direct injection. Then it’d be two on one - or at least one against one against two, and it was only going to end when everybody was dead. 

He curled his fist closed, then turned back to the thing. Anna had it backed into the building, another hatchet in hand, but it was getting ready to bolt one way or the other. And out here, there was nothing to pen it in. Nothing to keep it from vanishing into the distance. None of them were fast enough to catch it as they were. 

“Just get it down,” Evan growled. “Take off a leg or something.” 

“I do not need you to tell me how to fight.” 

They split up, and came at the thing from opposite sides. With Anna at the center, it still had ways to escape, but any one of them could intercept it. That much had to have occurred to it; it kept turning back and forth, trying to find the path of least resistance. 

It decided on Evan, and charged him directly. He brought up his cleaver and blocked the initial blow, but it almost bowled him over as it hit him. This close he could see into its eyes again: the glowing orange-white, the faint lines of what used to be irises, the torn and mottled skin burned into uselessness by the blight serum. 

The ruined mouth and throat made another sound that ramped up suddenly into a howl as an axe landed in its back. It wheeled away, scrabbling at the wound, and Evan landed a hit on its torso. Then Kazan charged in again. 

Between the three of them they managed to keep it pinned against the shack. Every time it tried to make an escape, someone caught it, slammed it back into the rotting wood. Every hit make the whole thing shake and crack and as Evan watched the wall looked like it was ready to cave in. Whether that was a good idea or not wasn’t clear yet. Would the chaos trap it or just let it escape? 

It jammed another syringe of serum into itself and stood still. Twitching, hissing, trembling, head darting between the three of them. Slowly, they tried to move in. To really box it in. But - 

But the fear of that thing suddenly turning its serum on them still had Evan and Anna unwilling to close that much more distance, even if neither one of them would admit to it being fear. The unrelenting agony was so distant but somehow still so fresh and it hurt to even _think_ about. 

So it was Kazan who finally took the last step. Furious and disgusted with them both, he suddenly lunged in. The thing turned, jerked away, and the blade caught it on the thigh. 

One swipe and it nearly cut through the whole leg as easily as it had taken Ghost Face’s head off. The thing managed a few more steps before the leg finally collapsed, twisting out of place on what connecting flesh was left. It howled, hissed, clawed at the dirt and swung its cane wildly as Evan approached. 

Kazan didn’t hesitate. He slammed a foot on the back of the thing’s other leg and jammed his sword into its back. Right through the spine, Evan figured, and then he did it again, this time higher up. Paralyzing it so it couldn’t move, but even that didn’t stop it; it kept thrashing, spilling blighted blood everywhere. 

Anna drove her axe straight down into its back, across the shoulders. It didn’t go through, but it did have enough weight to pin the thing, and, slowly, its struggles stopped. But it wasn’t dead yet. They could still hear the horrible hissing breathing and see the faint twitching of its fingers. 

With one foot Evan dragged the cane out of reach. Then he crouched down next to its head, cleaver gripped tight and ready to slam into the thing’s skull if it tried to lunge at him, and lifted the hood to see a little more carefully what lay underneath. 

Aside from the hunchback of tumors along its shoulders, it looked … almost human. It had been human once, and _this_ was what the blight serum had done to it. Instead of a temporary rage- and pain-fueled insanity, it had twisted the body permanently. There were faint wisps of graying hair on the skull. A scar that shone faintly silver even now against mottled skin. 

He pulled the whole thing up further and looked into its face, then down into the gouge that tore it open from nose to chest. It was hard to even grasp. It wasn’t a hole in the body, it was just … 

“How?” 

Anna had leaned down to see what he was looking at. Neither one of them could put it to words, and Evan shook his head. 

“Whatever he did to us, he did to himself worse.” 

“Or the Entity did.” 

“Maybe.” He pulled the body up as much as he could, but no serum syringes tipped out of what was left of the robe. “Would’ve thought it’d just kill him.” 

A shadow dropped over them both as Kazan suddenly loomed. The tip of his blade caught the thing by half of its ruined throat and scratched a thin line into the dulling orange glow. Serum oozed out. 

“Nothing but poison,” he snapped. “We should tear it to pieces.” 

“Won’t help.” Evan looked into the thing’s fading eyes. It was still hissing out breaths, but more ragged now. It wasn’t going to live much longer - for however much that counted in the fog. 

It’d come back. It’d end up barreling around the fog, and ending up in trials. It was clearly following the same orders they were bound to. At the same time, it _was_ connected to the fucker who’d attacked them all. Was it the same person? Was it another experiment gone godawfully wrong? 

The papers in the shack might have answered the question, but as the body slowly stilled, he dropped the hood. 

“Take your axe out.” 

When it was gone he rolled the twisted body over and jerked open the robe. Underneath there were ruined, tattered clothes, and a graying lining inside the robe itself. He pressed his fingers to it. There was a little bit of give, and then it wisped away around his hand. 

“Gets the serum there.” The front of the outfit was riddled with puncture wounds. He almost reached to pull that away and see what was underneath, but stopped himself before his curiosity made him sick. “Don’t see anything else.” 

“What are you looking for?” 

“An answer.” 

Evan sat back and stared at the cracked shack wall. Thoughts raged through his head. He didn’t have any answers, or at least ones that were sure enough to be satisfying. This whole hunt couldn’t have been a waste of their time. 

Anna, who knew his moods, rested a hand on his. 

“We have an answer,” she said, quietly. “This thing may have attacked us once, but it cannot now.” 

“It still is,” he snapped. “It couldn’t have turned into this, done all this, since it got the idiot and those little shits.” 

“Time does not work the same here.” For once, she let the insult to Legion pass. “You know this.” 

“So this is - what, the bastard in the future? And the Entity let it loose?” 

“It will use anything it finds in the fog.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Perhaps he hides in his past, and hunts in our present, and this … ” She looked down at the cooling body. “This is his future, and ours.” 

It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Evan looked at her, then down at the thing, that had finally stopped doing even the bare minimum to prove it was alive. 

“You saw what was below,” Kazan said suddenly. “The man in question _was_ found out. _This_ is what he became, whether through his own intervention or the Entity’s.” 

“But he’s still out there.” Evan turned to look up at Kazan. “And you’re probably next in line for an injection.” 

“He may try.” In one smooth movement Kazan resheathed his sword. “And he will fail.” 

Evan stayed silent. After a while Kazan turned and strode back into the fog. Anna stuck around until Evan finally stood up, leaving the dead body of the monster on the ground. 

He knew better than to question the Entity, mostly because there was no way to actually do it. It didn’t answer questions. It didn’t give reasons. Whatever happened in the fog just happened, and they had to put up with it. But letting someone run rampant on them for so long, even getting around what little control time had in this place, didn’t sit well with him. 

“We should go,” Anna said, picking up one of her hatchets. “It will revive soon. We don’t need to fight it again.” 

“We should kill it for good,” he grumbled. “Find the Void. Throw it in.” 

Her smile was wry as she turned away to get the rest of her hatchets, saying what he already knew: that the Entity was the only one who could get there and come back in one piece. 

Evan gave the dead thing another long, cold look before Anna finally pulled him back into the fog, but the memory of its eyes - and the agonized, miserable insanity he saw in them - followed him all the way to the estate.  
  


* * *

  
Somewhere else, some _when_ else, Talbot looked down at his latest notes and sighed. 

The smoky darkness under the strange shack he lived in gave him a constant headache, but that was nothing new; he’d spent half his life suffering from one kind of malady or another. The ancient blow to the head wasn’t helping anything, either. The scar still throbbed from time to time, and every time it did he saw bright, accusing hazel eyes. 

His work on the last two specimens had been worth all the trouble. Binding four bodies into one had been more successful than he could have imagined, even if it wasn’t perfect. It meant that he was nearly at the threshold of making the serum capable of binding multiple levels of not just physical form, but mental control. Hadn’t the body fought with itself until the strongest will won out? And if he could combine himself with something physically greater, then he had no doubt he could dominate its mind and wrest full control from it. 

And the other one … it had almost been human. It hadn’t grown any tumors. It _had_ caught fire in a strange way, burning from the inside out until the skin fused to the clothing, but aside from that the worst of the deformities was the sloughing skin at the shoulders. He needed to work on that formula to improve that further, and then catch the same specimen again. There was something in the blood, probably; he should have taken more samples. Even at first glance it had been one of the more human among them. The lower levels of interference from the Entity meant it was probably a much more valuable resource. Of course, catching one of them twice was always much more difficult. Paranoia made even the most reckless fools wary. 

He reached into the darkness absentmindedly and pulled a bottle of something stinging and alcoholic toward himself. There wasn’t a label on the bottle, but it hadn’t killed him yet, so he popped out the cork again and took a drink. It didn’t clear much but it did settle his nerves. 

Because the nerves were there, all the time. They were getting worse. He’d caught his hands shaking when he was out watching his subjects, and even when he was alone. Sometimes he saw his veins pulsing with orange light, and then when he blinked it was gone. 

He knew why. 

Staring into the darkness, Talbot could see a flicker of the future. Of himself. Something godawful and monstrous, something of _his own creation_. A failure. _His_ failure. 

He’d failed before in his life, but this had finally been an opportunity to succeed. Not just to escape this hellish prison that had seemed so appealing at the start, but to free the other prisoners and - most of all - to improve the human condition. To make humanity greater. To _evolve_ them, and step back into the world ready to bring it into a new age of enlightenment. 

The pustula flowers had been his greatest discovery since being brought to the temple, but even now they were threatening to undo him. Not only were they rare, they led his captor straight to him - the captor that he’d evaded for so long, hiding almost undetected right under its metaphorical nose. 

The purge was over for now. He was hidden away again, with only a little left to work with. It was time to go exploring the edges of the fog again, finding resources, tracking subjects, and stealing whatever he could from the long-lost caches of his only peer in the fog - the man he had never met and likely never would, the only person who had set foot in the total destruction of the Void and made it out the other side. 

Even his notes had run dry. There had to be more out there. There had to be other ways to finish this. To perfect and complete his serum. To escape, and to _survive._

To not become the thing he saw in his nightmares, running loose in the fog in a future he couldn’t accept was going to happen. 

A distant pain pulsed in his gut, and Talbot took another swig from the bottle. That was happening almost as often as the headaches these days. He didn’t buy that illness was a thing in the fog - at least, illness of its own volition - so all he could do to treat it was try to numb the source. 

After a long moment, he pushed the bottle aside and went back to work.


End file.
